SLA data management criteria

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) represent service management contracts that are processed by monitoring and measurement mechanisms for the evaluation of the signatories adherence to the agreed service levels during service execution. The paper discusses SLA data management characteristics that need to be considered in the design of data models for SLA documents. The SLA anatomy is introduced with respect to the Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) [1] language specification. Furthermore, the paper highlights current obstacles for the integration of automated SLA management in the cloud business setting. The contributed SLA data analysis maps SLA terms to data management attributes according to their operational relevance during the SLA activity. We present an SLA digraph model for the automated SLA formulation and data handling. The SLA digraph is introduced as a programming module that sits on the application layer and communicates with backend data stores for the SLA persistence.