Abstract-Service Level Agreements (SLA) are commonly used to define terms and conditions of service provisioning.
WS-Agreement1 is an SLA specification that addresses the need of both producers and consumers of services to specify and negotiate terms and conditions of access to these services. This specification has gained wide acceptance in both the Grid computing and Web Services communities. WS-Agreement includes support for both negotiating and specifying penalties that arise from violation of these terms and conditions. It does not, however, include support for monitoring these agreements to determine if any such violations have occurred and, if so, determining which parties are responsible. This paper proposes a framework and design for secure and reliable monitoring of WS-Agreement specified SLAs. Modifications to WS-Agreement are necessary for effective monitoring. These modifications are outlined, along with an implementation of the framework in the AgentScape middleware system.
Service level agreements (SLAs) provide a means to define specific Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees between providers and consumers of services. Negotiation and definition of these QoS characteristics is an area of significant research. However, defining the actions that take place when an agreement is violated is a topic of more recent focus. This paper discusses recent advances in this field and propose some additional features that can help both consumers and producers during the enactment of services. These features include the ability to (re)negotiate penalties in an agreement, and specifically focuses on the renegotiation of penalties during enactment to reflect ongoing violations.
Online marketplaces are emerging in which services are provided and consumed. Parties make online agreements regarding the terms and conditions of service provisioning. For certain kinds of services, it may be necessary to know whether it is being provisioned according to the agreement. To this end, the service may be monitored. For instance, a web application service may be monitored to guarantee that the response time of the application is within acceptable limits. The decision of whether or not to monitor a service is correlated to the perceived level of risk that a violation will occur. If there is a low level of perceived risk, monitoring may not be required, and vice versa. The perceived level of risk associated with a service transaction can change over time. However, traditional monitoring techniques are not able to react to this change. This paper proposes a self-adaptive service monitor that adapts to changes in the perceived level of risk. This monitor combines a traditional service monitor with a self-monitoring protocol, referred to as passive monitoring. This monitor is implemented in the AgentScape Middleware.
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