SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT SPECIFICATION, COMPLIANCE PREDICTION AND MONITORING WITH PERFORMANCE TREES
NJ Dingle, W.J. Knottenbelt, L. Wang · Spiral (Imperial College London) · 2008
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are widely used throughout industry but suffer from specification ambiguities and difficulties in predicting and monitoring compliance. To address these issues, we propose the use of the Performance Tree formalism for the specification and monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Specifically, we show how the basic Performance Tree formalism can be adapted to provide a rigorous yet accessible and expressive means to specify common SLA metrics. Using established performance analysis tools that support Performance Trees, this allows system designers to check SLA compliance on formal models of their system before implementation. We also propose an architecture for a system of measurement agents that enables the same performance requirements to be monitored in the context of a live implementation.