Decision support for business-related design of service level agreements

When designing services, a service provider has to define the quality of service levels that will be offered to customers. These service level objectives (SLOs) form the basis for service level agreements (SLAs) between the provider and consumers of services. The design of SLAs is a complex task which needs to combine business considerations regarding revenues, costs and penalties, and technical considerations with respect to feasible service levels. This paper proposes an approach that simultaneously takes into account business parameters and technical constraints for supporting the creation of service level agreements. Based on a statistical model derived from empirical service quality data, the relationship between service level objectives and potential penalty payments is investigated with respect to the long-term profit of the service provider. Based on the results, a practical support for deciding SLO thresholds is provided. The methodology is demonstrated and evaluated with the availability metric.