Establishing and Monitoring SLAs in Complex Service Based Systems

In modern service economies, service provisioning needs to be regulated by complex SLA hierarchies among providers of heterogeneous services, defined at the business, software, and infrastructure layers. Starting from the SLA Management framework defined in the SLA@SOI EU FP7 Integrated Project, we focus on the relationship between establishment and monitoring of such SLAs, showing how the two processes become tightly interleaved in order to provide meaningful mechanisms for SLA management. We first describe the process for SLA establishment adopted within the framework; then,we propose an architecture for monitoring SLAs, which satisfies the two main requirements introduced by SLA establishment: the availability of historical data for evaluating SLA offers and the assessment of the capability to monitor the terms in a SLA offer.