Showing papers on "Service-level agreement published in 2003"

The WSLA Framework: Specifying and Monitoring Service Level Agreements for Web Services

Abstract: We describe a novel framework for specifying and monitoring Service Level Agreements (SLA) for Web Services. SLA monitoring and enforcement become increasingly important in a Web Service environment where enterprise applications and services rely on services that may be subscribed dynamically and on-demand. For economic and practical reasons, we want an automated provisioning process for both the service itself as well as the SLA managment system that measures and monitors the QoS parameters, checks the agreed-upon service levels, and reports violations to the authorized parties involved in the SLA management process. Our approach to these issues is presented in this paper. The Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) framework is targeted at defining and monitoring SLAs for Web Services. Although WSLA has been designed for a Web Services environment, it is applicable as well to any inter-domain management scenario, such as business process and service management, or the management of networks, systems and applications in general. The WSLA framework consists of a flexible and extensible language based on XML Schema and a runtime architecture comprising several SLA monitoring services, which may be outsourced to third parties to ensure a maximum of objectivity. WSLA enables service customers and providers to unambiguously define a wide variety of SLAs, specify the SLA parameters and the way they are measured, and relate them to managed resource instrumentations. Upon receipt of an SLA specification, the WSLA monitoring services are automatically configured to enforce the SLA. An implementation of the WSLA framework, termed SLA Compliance Monitor, is publicly available as part of the IBM Web Services Toolkit.

Service overlay networks: SLAs, QoS, and bandwidth provisioning

Abstract: We advocate the notion of service overlay network (SON) as an effective means to address some of the issues, in particular, end-to-end quality of service (QoS), plaguing the current Internet, and to facilitate the creation and deployment of value-added Internet services such as VoIP, Video-on-Demand, and other emerging QoS-sensitive services. The SON purchases bandwidth with certain QoS guarantees from the individual network domains via bilateral service level agreement (SLA) to build a logical end-to-end service delivery infrastructure on top of the existing data transport networks. Via a service contract, users directly pay the SON for using the value-added services provided by the SON. In this paper, we study the bandwidth provisioning problem for a SON which buys bandwidth from the underlying network domains to provide end-to-end value-added QoS sensitive services such as VoIP and Video-on-Demand. A key problem in the SON deployment is the problem of bandwidth provisioning, which is critical to cost recovery in deploying and operating the value-added services over the SON. The paper is devoted to the study of this problem. We formulate the bandwidth provisioning problem mathematically, taking various factors such as SLA, service QoS, traffic demand distributions, and bandwidth costs. Analytical models and approximate solutions are developed for both static and dynamic bandwidth provisioning. Numerical studies are also performed to illustrate the properties of the proposed solutions and demonstrate the effect of traffic demand distributions and bandwidth costs on SON bandwidth provisioning.

QoS-assured service composition in managed service overlay networks

Abstract: Many value-added and content delivery services are being offered via service level agreements (SLAs). These services can be interconnected to form a service overlay network (SON) over the Internet. Service composition in SON has emerged as a cost-effective approach to quickly creating new services. Previous research has addressed the reliability, adaptability, and compatibility issues for composed services. However little has been done to manage generic quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for composed services, based on the SLA contracts of individual services. In this paper we present QUEST a QoS assUred composEable Service infrasTructure, to address the problem. QUEST framework provides: (1) initial service composition, which can compose a qualified service path under multiple QoS constraints (e.g., response time, availability). If multiple qualified service paths exist, QUEST chooses the best one according to the load balancing metric; and (2) dynamic service composition, which can dynamically recompose the service path to quickly recover from service outages and QoS violations. Different from the previous work, QUEST can simultaneously achieve QoS assurances and good load balancing in SON.

Verity: a QoS metric for selecting Web services and providers

Abstract: With the proliferation of Web services, quality of service serves as a benchmark to differentiate the services and their providers. As of today, a wide spectrum of attributes have been identified to account for the quality of a service like availability, reliability, servability, performance, reputation and so on. Reputation has been measured as an average user rating and we argue that the user perception alone is not sufficient to indicate the reputation. It is necessary to measure how trustworthy the provider has been in complying with the agreed levels in the SLA (service level agreement). To quantify the consistency in compliance levels, we introduce a new QoS attribute termed verity and propose an architecture to quantify it. We argue that verity should be taken into account for a quality driven selection and composition of Web services. Reputation, when expressed as a vector of user rating, compliance and verity is a more intuitive indicator of the provider's trustworthiness.

Quality of service terminology in IP networks

Abstract: This article provides an overview of commonly used terminology related to quality of service assurance in IP networks. Several approaches to QoS definition, including those of IETF, ITU, and ETSI, are presented and compared. Terms associated with QoS like class of service, grade of service, service level agreement, as well as service level specification (SLS), traffic conditioning agreement (TCA), and traffic conditioning specification (TCS) are discussed. Terminology used in two QoS architectures, IntServ and DiffServ, is also introduced.

A Service Level Agreement Language for Dynamic Electronic Services

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel language for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for dynamic and spontaneous electronic services. In a cross-organizational setting, it is important for customers of a service to obtain, monitor and enforce quality of service (QoS) guarantees by service providers, usually expressed in the form of SLAs. Since the supervision and management of SLAs and the provisioning of corresponding systems should be automated for economic reasons, we need a formal language to define an SLA. If, moreover, providers and customers want to sign custom-made SLAs, the SLA language, correspondingly, must provide a large degree of flexibility. The SLA language described in this paper aims at providing the needed flexibility by means of an XML-based representation and a runtime system for SLAs. Using this language, parties to an SLA can describe how parameters are measured and computed from raw metrics, the guarantees they want with respect to those parameters and the involvement of third parties to, e.g., independently verify SLA compliance.

System for managing and controlling storage access requirements

Abstract: A Resource Management and Reservation System (RMRS) for managing and reserving storage bandwidth, is a platform independent middleware layer that provides an interface to applications, their database management systems, or some other higher level data management systems like ADRS which does data management on behalf of the applications. RMRS is highly relevant in hosted environments where one or more applications may be run on behalf of multiple customers each with a unique service level agreement with the Service Provider. Through its interface to the aforementioned applications, RMRS allows each application or an application side management system to communicate expected future storage access requirements (e.g., periodic access for backups). The interface also allows applications to request urgent storage access (e.g., recovery actions may be requested without being planned ahead of time).

Scheduling in HPC Resource Management Systems: Queuing vs. Planning

Abstract: Nearly all existing HPC systems are operated by resource management systems based on the queuing approach. With the increasing acceptance of grid middleware like Globus, new requirements for the underlying local resource management systems arise. Features like advanced reservation or quality of service are needed to implement high level functions like co-allocation. However it is difficult to realize these features with a resource management system based on the queuing concept since it considers only the present resource usage.

PANDA: Specifying Policies for Automated Negotiations of Service Contracts

Abstract: The Web and Grid services frameworks provide a promising infrastructure for cross-organizational use of online services. The use of services in large-scale and cross-organizational environments requires the negotiation of agreements that define these services. Buying at a fine granularity just when a need arises is only feasible if the costs of establishing new agreements are low. Today, negotiation is often a manual process yet many simple online services would allow full or partial automation. The PANDA approach automates decision-making and proposes to specify a negotiation policy, expressing a party’s private negotiation strategy, by combining rules and utility functions. In addition, the decision-making problem can be decomposed into different aspects that can be executed by different interacting decision-makers. Using PANDA for policy specification and negotiation decision-making reduces the costs of setting up new services and contracts. Hence, the use of fine-grained on-demand services becomes feasible.

Method of displaying real-time service level performance, breach, and guaranteed uniformity with automatic alerts and proactive rebating for utility computing environment

Abstract: The present invention provides a method, apparatus, and computer program product for displaying real-time service level performance, breach, and guaranteed uniformity with automatic alerts and proactive rebating for a utility computing environment. Service level agreement parameters, based on a service level agreement between a customer and a service provider, are used to identify discrepancies in a promised service level for the utility computing environment. A real-time view of a current service level and the promised service level for the customer are displayed. When a discrepancy between the promised service level and the current service level occurs, a rebate is generated for the customer. Alerts identifying the discrepancy and its root cause are provided to the customer and the service provider for the discrepancy. Alerts may also be provided prior to the occurrence of the discrepancy so that an action may be performed to eliminate the potential discrepancy.

Web Services Differentiation with Service Level Agreements

Abstract: This paper describes a framework for providing differentiated levels of Web services to different customers on the basis of service level agreements (SLAs). Service providers can offer Web services at different service levels, for example, at bronze, silver and gold levels with increasingly better response times. In general, the service levels are differentiated based on many variables such as responsiveness, availability, and performance. The framework described in this paper comprises the Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) language to specify SLAs in a flexible and individualized way, a system to monitor the compliance of a provided service with a service level agreement, and a workload management system that prioritizes requests according to the associated SLAs. Using this framework, service providers can efficiently and flexibly manage their resources to optimize customer satisfaction and, potentially, yield.

QoS Adaptation in Service-Oriented Grids.

Abstract: Some applications utilizing Grid computing infrastructure require the simultaneous allocation of resources, such as compute servers, networks, memory, disk storage and other specialized resources. Collaborative working and visualization is one example of such applications. In this context, Quality of Service (QoS) is related to Grid services, and not just to the network connecting these services. With the emerging interest in service-oriented Grids, resources may be advertised and traded as services based on a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Such a SLA must include both general and technical specifications, including pricing policy and properties of the resources required to execute the service – to ensure QoS requirements are satisfied. A QoS adaptation algorithm is presented to enable the dynamic adjustment of behavior of an application based on changes in the pre-defined SLA. The approach is particularly useful if workload or network traffic changes in unpredictable ways during an active session. The proposed QoS adaptation scheme is used to compensate for QoS degradation and optimize resource utilization, by increasing the number of requests managed over a particular time.

Insurance for service level agreements in e-utilities and other e-service environments

Abstract: A method and system for indemnifying an insurance purchaser by an insurance provider against losses resulting from specified events. In one embodiment, the specified events include quality of service penalties of a service level agreement between a service provider and service purchaser. The invention may include at least one risk metric monitored via a communication network, such that a premium payable to the insurer by the insurance purchaser is dependent on the risk metric. In a particular configuration of the invention, the risk metric is monitored in real-time or near real-time.

Evaluating application service providers

Abstract: Discusses the application service provider (ASP) model, which is emerging as a new form of application outsourcing. At present, the ASP marketplace is largely vendor driven with huge numbers of vendors offering a variety of applications to the customer. These offerings may belong to software applications such as enterprise resource planning, collaborative and vertical industry. Even though there are many benefits attributed to this model suggests that, in order to reap these benefits, customers should evaluate the offerings of the ASPs. Addressing this purpose develops a taxonomy to identify the various ASP offerings and a framework to evaluate the ASP offerings on categories such as security, pricing, integration, service level agreement, and reliability, availability and scalability. Even though this framework is in an early stage of development it intends to present existing customers with performance criteria for evaluating ASP offerings. Concludes that further empirical research needs to be carried out to refine this framework and also to find the relevance of traditional outsourcing literature to this new form of outsourcing.

Course content development for business driven learning solutions

Abstract: Disclosed herein are learning solutions that utilize a content development module that is nested inside a total learning solution and identifies, develops, and manages required course content. A content development module is particularly adapted to assemble and compile custom learning content materials for use in the learning solution by appropriately taking business strategy alignment and other information into consideration. The learning content may be developed as a third party service in accordance with a service level agreement. A service level agreement is a contract between the learning solution services provider and the learner (i.e., outsourcing) organization that establishes the requisite quality and effectiveness levels of the learning solution services as measured by one or more performance metrics. In such cases where a service level agreement is present, internal performance metrics are constantly evaluated to ensure that the content development and management resources necessary for a given learning effort are properly reserved, allocated, and/or utilized.

Access control and trust in the use of widely distributed services

Abstract: OASIS is a role-based access control (RBAC) architecture for achieving secure interoperation of independently managed services in an open, distributed environment. OASIS differs from other RBAC schemes in a number of ways: role management is decentralized, roles are parametrized, roles are activated within sessions and privileges are not delegated. OASIS depends on an active middleware platform to notify services of any relevant changes in their environment.Services define roles and establish formally specified policy for role activation and service use (authorization); users must present the required credentials and satisfy specified constraints in order to activate a role or invoke a service. The membership rule of a role indicates which of the role activation conditions must remain true while the role is active. A role is deactivated immediately if any of the conditions of the membership rule associated with its activation become false.OASIS introduces the notion of appointment, whereby being active in certain roles carries the privilege of issuing appointment certificates to other users. Appointment certificates capture the notion of long-lived credentials such as academic and professional qualification or membership of an organization. The role activation conditions of a service may include appointment certificates, prerequisite roles and environmental constraints.The role activation and authorization policies of services within an administrative domain need not embody role hierarchies nor enforce privilege delegation. But OASIS is sufficiently flexible to capture such notions, through prerequisite roles and appointments, if they are required within an application domain.We define the model and architecture and discuss engineering details, including security issues. We illustrate how an OASIS session can span multiple domains and we propose a minimal infrastructure to enable widely distributed, independently developed services to enter into agreements to respect each other's credentials. In a multi-domain system access control policy may come from multiple sources and must be expressed, enforced and managed. In order to respond to changing relationships between organizations it should be easy to allow role holders in one domain to obtain privileges in another. Our approach to policy and meta-policy management is described.We speculate on a further extension to mutually unknown, and therefore untrusted, parties. Each party will accumulate audit certificates which embody its interaction history and which may form the basis of a web of trust.

Method, apparatus, and program for scheduling resources in a penalty-based environment

Abstract: The present invention relates to the problem of scheduling work for employees and/or other resources in a help desk or similar environment. The employees have different levels of training and availabilities. The jobs, which occur as a result of dynamically occurring events, consist of multiple tasks ordered by chain precedence. Each job and/or task carries with it a penalty which is a step function of the time taken to complete it, the deadlines and penalties having been negotiated as part of one or more service level agreement contracts. The goal is to minimize the total amount of penalties paid. The invention consists of a pair of heuristic schemes for this difficult scheduling problem, one greedy and one randomized. The greedy scheme is used to provide a quick initial solution, while the greedy and randomized schemes are combined in order to think more deeply about particular problem instances. The invention also includes a scheme for determining how much time to allocate to thinking about each of several potential problem instance variants.

Method, system, and program for managing input/output (I/O) performance between host systems and storage volumes

Abstract: Provided are a method, system, and program for managing a network providing Input/Output (I/O) paths between a plurality of host systems and storage volumes in storage systems. An application service connection definition is provided for each connection from a host to a storage volume. At least one service level guarantee definition is provided indicating performance criteria to satisfy service requirements included in at least one service level agreement with at least one customer for network resources. Each service level guarantee definition is associated with at least one application service connection definition. Monitoring is performed as to whether Input/Output (I/O) requests transmitted through the multiple I/O paths satisfy performance criteria indicated in the service level guarantee definition associated with the I/O paths.

Managing eBusiness on demand SLA contracts in business terms using the cross-SLA execution manager SAM

Abstract: It is imperative for a competitive e-business service provider to be positioned to manage the execution of its service level agreement (SLA) contracts in business terms (e.g., minimizing financial penalties for service-level violations, maximizing service-level measurement based customer satisfaction metrics). This paper briefly describes the design rationale of an integrated set of business-oriented service level management (SLM) technologies under development in the SAM project at IBM TJ Watson Research Center. The e-business SLA execution manager SAM, (1) enables the provider to deploy an effective means of capturing and managing contractual SLA data as well as provider-facing non-contractual SLM data; (2) assists service personnel to prioritize the processing of action-demanding quality management alerts as per the provider's SLM objectives; and (3) automates the prioritization and execution management Of approved SLM processes on behalf of the provider, including assigning SLM tasks to service personnel.

Forward looking infrastructure re-provisioning

Abstract: The present invention provides systems and methods for predicting expected service levels based on measurements relating to network traffic data. Measured network performance characteristics can be converted to metrics for quantifying network performance. The response time metric may be described as a service level metric whereas bandwidth, latency, utilization and processing delays may be classified as component metrics of the service level metric. Service level metrics have certain entity relationships with their component metrics that may be exploited to provide a predictive capability for service levels and performance. The present invention involves system and methods for processing metrics representing current conditions in a network, in order to predict future values of those metrics. Based on predicted service level information, actions may be taken to avoid violation of a service level agreement including, but not limited to, deployment of network engineers, re-provisioning equipment, identifying rogue elements, etc.

Service performance correlation (SPC) and service fault correlation (SFC) for managing services transported over circuit-oriented and connectionless networks

Abstract: Described are a system and method for managing a service transported over a transport network. Service traffic is transmitted from a first network element to a second network element over a transport network. If one of the network elements detects a condition occurring in the transport network, the network element determines each service affected by the condition. Service traffic performance is measured at each of the first and second network elements. Each network element correlates its measure service traffic performance and the service to produce a performance of service (PoS) service metric. Each network element transmits its measured PoS service metric to the other network element over a service management channel. This enables each network element to correlate both performance (SPC) and fault (SFC) for both near and far end service metrics and enables a complete end to end service definition in support of a service level agreement (SLA).

Method and apparatus for auditing service level agreements by test packet insertion

Abstract: The present invention is directed to the measurement of service levels provided by a communication network, including an Internet protocol communication network. In accordance with the present invention, test packets are sent from a first edge router across the communication network to a second edge router. The time required for the test packets to be transmitted across the communication network is then determined, and that time compared to the time specified by the governing service level agreement. A failure of the communication network to deliver test packets as guaranteed may be used as an indication that the service level agreement has been violated. Packet loss and packet jitter may also be measured and compared to levels guaranteed by the service level agreement. The present invention may be used to determine whether the delivery of data packets using requests for expedited service levels is necessary or desirable.

Declarative ACD routing with service level optimization

Abstract: A method including determining a current rate of satisfying a service level agreement constraint, wherein the service level agreement constraint is associated to selected ones of each incoming contact within a contact center, comparing the current rate to a target rate associated with the service level agreement constraint to calculate a satisfaction value, measuring a size of a queue associated with the service level agreement constraint, and calculating a potential value associated with the service level agreement constraint based on the satisfaction value, the queue size and a weighted priority level associated with the service level agreement constraint.

Device and method for classifying alarm messages resulting from a violation of a service level agreement in a communications network

Abstract: A service data control device inside a communications network includes control means (3) placed in such a way so as to classify according to at least one selected criterion alarm messages generated by detection means (2) when at least one specification of a service level, known as >, violation is detected on the basis of service data originating from the network and for delivering these classified alarm messages to a graphic interface (8) so that they are displayed according to their classification.

Efficient and transparent instrumentation of application components using an aspect-oriented approach

Abstract: The increasing significance of Service Level Management (SLM) strongly requires an appropriate instrumentation of application components in order to monitor compliance with the defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs). The manual instrumentation of application components is very costly and error-prone and thus rather inefficient.

Simple Obligation and Right Model (SORM) – for the Runtime Management of Electronic Service Contracts

Abstract: Online purchase and delivery of goods and services requires an electronic contracting process. Formalization of contractual content enables automatic delivery of services and monitoring of the terms and conditions of the contract at service runtime. The Simple Obligation and Right Model (SORM) provides an abstract, domain-independent model of contractual content. Model instances can be interpreted and managed by applications involved in checking contractual entitlements and delivering and supervising a service in compliance with contractual rights and obligations. It captures the main types of rights and obligations and deals with their dynamics during the life-time of a contract.

Network availability based service differentiation

Abstract: Numerous approaches have been proposed to manage Quality of Service in the Internet. However, none of them was successfully deployed in a commercial IP backbone, mostly because of their complexity. In this paper, we take advantage of the excess network bandwidth to offer a degraded class of traffic. We identify and analyze the impact of link failures on such a service and show that under certain circumstances they provide the main vector to service differentiation. We simulate our QoS scheme on a real IP backbone topology and derive Service Level Agreements for the new degraded service. We find that by adding a degraded class of traffic in the network, we can at least double the link utilization with no impact on the current backbone traffic.

Methods, systems and computer program products for early warning of potential service level agreement violations

Abstract: Monitoring compliance with a service level agreement is provided by generating an early warning notification indicating that failure to meet a service level objective of the service level agreement by a resource is about to occur. The early warning notification may include an indication of how close the resource is to failing to meet the service level objective.

Service level agreement compliance measurement

Abstract: A method, computer program product, and data processing system for attaining measurements to assess the compliance of individual service providers in a complex distributed enterprise computing system is disclosed. The present invention achieves this goal by augmenting a middleware computing environment with a facility for timestamping individual sub-operations at each service provider. In a preferred embodiment, when a message incorporating a transaction is handed off to a service provider, an “in-time” timestamp is generated and appended to the message. When the service provider completes processing of its portion of the transaction, an “out-time” timestamp is generated and appended to the message. When the processing of the transaction is completed, a record of the processing time for each service provider can be found in the message. This information can then be used to verify whether one or more of the service providers are in breach of a service level agreement.