Service Level Agreement Monitoring Research Articles

Deep CNN and LSTM Approaches for Efficient Workload Prediction in Cloud Environment

In the dynamic landscape of cloud computing, efficient resource allocation and workload prediction are paramount for optimizing infrastructure utilization, cost management, and overall service quality. As a result, an efficient resource management approach involves pooling available resources among many customers in a manner that considers their energy usage, SLAs, and forecasting accuracy all at once. Based on the performance analysis results, it is determined that integrating these techniques would result in the most efficient and adaptable cloud data centre. We proposed a Model based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for handling SLAs in the cloud from both the perspective of consumers and service providers. Subsequently, we delve into the methodology of applying deep CNN and LSTM models to the problem of workload prediction in cloud environments. This methodology encompasses data preprocessing, model architecture, training parameters, and the choice of performance metrics. To anticipate CPU consumption from time series data and detect SLA violations, we suggested a DCNN-LSTM model. The accuracy prediction, energy usage, CPU use, and Service Level Agreement monitoring are all a part of this model. The proposed method is effective in helping cloud providers cut down on service violations and associated fines. Regarding the composite metric of Energy SLA Violation, which assesses the combined aspects of energy use and adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs), DCNN-LSTM surpasses ARIMA-LSTM, CNN, LSTM, and ARIMA 6.8%, 10.88%, 16.6%, and 22.4%, respectively.

A blockchain-based SLA monitoring and compliance assessment for IoT ecosystems

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) establishes the trustworthiness of service providers and consumers in several domains; including the Internet of Things (IoT). Given the proliferation of Blockchain technology, we find it compelling to reconsider the assumption of trust and centralised governance typically practised in SLA management including monitoring, compliance assessment, and penalty enforcement. Therefore, we argue that, such critical tasks should be operated by blockchain-based smart contracts in a non-repudiable manner beyond the influence of any SLA party. This paper envisions an IoT scenario wherein a firefighting station outsources end-to-end IoT operations to a specialised service provider. The contractual relationship between them is governed by an SLA which stipulates a set of quality requirements and violation consequences. The main contribution of this paper lies in designing, deploying and empirically experimenting a novel blockchain-based SLA monitoring and compliance assessment framework in the context of IoT. This is done by utilising Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), an enterprise-grade blockchain technology. Our work highlights a set of considerations and best practice at two sides, the IoT application monitoring-side and the blockchain-side. Moreover, it experimentally validates the reliability of the proposed monitoring approach, which collects relevant metrics from each IoT component and examines them against the quality requirements stated in the SLA. Finally, we propose a novel design for smart contracts at the blockchain-side, analyse and benchmark the performance, and demonstrate that the new design proves to successfully handle Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) conflicts typically encountered in blockchain applications, while maintaining sound throughput and latency.

Service Level Agreement Monitoring as a Service: An Independent Monitoring Service for Service Level Agreements in Clouds.

The cloud network is rapidly growing due to a massive increase in interconnected devices and the emergence of different technologies such as the Internet of things, fog computing, and artificial intelligence. In response, cloud computing needs reliable dealings among the service providers, brokers, and consumers. The existing cloud monitoring frameworks such as Amazon Cloud Watch, Paraleap Azure Watch, and Rack Space Cloud Kick work under the control of service providers. They work fine; however, this may create dissatisfaction among customers over Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. Customers' dissatisfaction may drastically reduce the businesses of service providers. To cope with the earlier mentioned issue and get in line with cloud philosophy, Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), completely independent in nature, is needed for observing and regulating the cloud businesses. However, the existing MaaS frameworks do not address the comprehensive SLA for customer satisfaction and penalties management. This article proposes a reliable framework for monitoring the provider's services by adopting third-party monitoring services with clearcut SLA and penalties management. Since this framework monitors SLA as a cloud monitoring service, it is named as SLA-MaaS. On violations, it penalizes those who are found in breach of terms and condition enlisted in SLA. Simulation results confirmed that the proposed framework adequately satisfies the customers (as well as service providers). This helps in developing a trustworthy relationship among cloud partners and increases customer attention and retention.

Adaptive Runtime Monitoring of Service Level Agreement Violations in Cloud Computing

The cloud service level agreement (SLA) manage the relationship between service providers and consumers in cloud computing. SLA is an integral and critical part of modern era IT vendors and communication contracts. Due to low cost and flexibility more and more consumers delegate their tasks to cloud providers, the SLA emerges as a key aspect between the consumers and providers. Continuous monitoring of Quality of Service (QoS) attributes is required to implement SLAs because of the complex nature of cloud communication. Many other factors, such as user reliability, satisfaction, and penalty on violations are also taken into account. Currently, there is no such policy of cloud SLA monitoring to minimize SLA violations. In this work, we have proposed a cloud SLA monitoring policy by dividing a monitoring session into two parts, for critical and non-critical parameters. The critical and non-critical parameters will be decided on the interest of the consumer during SLA negotiation. This will help to shape a new comprehensive SLA based Proactive Resource Allocation Approach (RPAA) which will monitor SLA at runtime, analyze the SLA parameters and try to find the possibility of SLA violations. We also have implemented an adaptive system for allocating cloud IT resources based on SLA violations and detection. We have defined two main components of SLA-PRAA i.e., (a) Handler and (b) Accounting and Billing Manager. We have also described the function of both components through algorithms. The experimental results validate the performance of our proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art cloud SLA policies.

Reinforcing SLA Consensus on Blockchain

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Service Level Agreements (SLAs) assessment constitutes the de facto area of interest and applications in the public cloud infrastructure. However, the domination of colossal corporations tends to monopolize the way metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measured and determined, leading to governed environments where the clientele is unable to obtain accurate and unbiased assessment of SLAs. Leaning toward SLA self-assessment, this paper provides a fair SLA consensus approach with innate transparency and privacy by leveraging permissioned blockchains that are equipped with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). The SLA assessment intelligence is performed inside enclaved smart contracts isolated from the on-chain entities views. The result constitutes a permissioned blockchain ecosystem where the IaaS and their clientele commonly agree on all the respective SLA monitoring and computation rules beforehand, as defined in any SLA assessment process, while the SLA consensus scheme constantly audits the SLA metrics based on these pre-approved regulations.

Blockchain-enabled real-time SLA monitoring for cloud-hosted services

Cloud computing is an important technology for businesses and individual users to obtain computing resources over the Internet on-demand and flexibly. Although cloud computing has been adopted across diverse applications, the owners of time-and-performance critical applications require cloud service providers’ guarantees about their services, such as availability and response times. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a mechanism to communicate and enforce such guarantees typically represented as service level objectives (SLOs), and financial penalties are imposed on SLO violations. Due to delays and inaccuracies caused by manual processing, an automatic method to periodically verify SLA terms in a transparent and trustworthy manner is fundamental to effective SLA monitoring, leading to the acceptance and credibility of such service to the customers of cloud services. This paper presents a blockchain-based distributed infrastructure that leverages fundamental blockchain properties to achieve immutable and trustworthy SLA monitoring within cloud services. The paper carries out an in-depth empirical investigation for the scalability of the proposed system in order to address the challenge of transparently enforcing real-time monitoring of cloud-hosted services leveraging blockchain technology. This will enable all the stakeholders to enforce accurate execution of SLA without any imprecisions and delays by maintaining an immutable ledger publicly across blockchain network. The experimentation takes into consideration several attributes of blockchain which are critical in achieving optimum performance. The paper also investigates key characteristics of these factors and their impact to the behaviour of the system for further scaling it up under various cases for increased service utilization.

A novel service level agreement model using blockchain and smart contract for cloud manufacturing in industry 4.0

ABSTRACT The number of service offerings in cloud manufacturing continues to grow, so that service level agreement (SLA) within cloud manufacturing is increasingly used to ensure the coordination of the cross-organisational business processes between the cloud service providers (CSP) and cloud service consumers (CSC). The definition of SLA and monitoring SLA’s performance are significant and should be highly valued to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of business services. At present, the third-party monitoring methods based on service credit are mainly applied in cloud manufacturing environments. There is no effective supervision mechanism to monitor the third party and no efficient punishment mechanism on SLA violation. To address aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a novel Service Level Agreement model by integrating Blockchain and Smart Contract (SLABSC), in which trust issues among CSP, CSC, and the third-party monitoring can be addressed through Blockchain technologies. The method proposed in this paper realises the full functionality of SLABSC and facilitates data security, and it can be used to supervise CSP to provide better services. Experiments results show that the performance of the proposed model is valid and efficient.

Dynamic Management of Security Policies in PrivOrBAC

This article is a continuation of our previous work on identifying and developing tools and concepts to provide automatic management and derivation of security and privacy policies. In this document we are interested in the extension of the PrivOrBAC model in order to ensure a dynamic management of privacy-aware security policies. Our approach, based on smart contracts (SC) and the WS-Agreement Specification, allows automatic agents representing data providers and access requesters to enter into an access agreement that takes into consideration not only service level clauses but also security rules to protect the privacy of individuals. Our solution can be deployed in such a way that no human intervention is required to reach this type of agreement. This work shows how to use the WS-Agreement Specification to set up a process for negotiating, creating and monitoring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in accordance with a predefined access control policy. This article concludes with a case study accompanied by a representative implementation of our solution.

Implementing service level agreements in custody operations and software systems

This paper discusses a software design concept that allows custodians to map the content of their service level agreements (SLA) directly into their software systems and therefore their operations. It discusses the shortcomings of traditional software design concepts of transaction-processing systems when it comes to SLA monitoring and user guidance. The paper identifies the absence of a formalized description of the SLA as one of the major obstacles for the implementation of appropriate controls. As an alternative, the paper proposes a design that allows for such a formal description, which can be directly linked to specific processing rules, checks and parameter settings of the custody software. The current authors expect such a design to help business teams to proactively monitor potential upcoming SLA violations, therefore increasing SLA compliance and reducing operational risk.

Service Broker-Based Architecture Using Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Service Level Agreement

With the on-going trends of the telecom services, the number of service providers with similar functionalities is undergoing a rapid growth. The customers face the difficulty to decide which service provider can satisfy their needs and full their requirements. Negotiating contracts between involved parts, and hiding heterogeneity in the distributed network environment has been challenging for telecom operators and service providers. Different languages exist to describe the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is a contract between a service provider and a customer. However, since each service provider expresses his SLA in his own way, it disrupts the customer's choice of the best service provider, and leads to a bad contract management. In this respect, we propose a novel architecture for service selection, and SLA management between different stakeholders in our network architecture. The idea is to set up a smart broker where we implemented a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method to maximize utility function so that the customer can choose services with required QoS performances. We also came up with the idea of settling a negotiation model for the SLA, and a context based SLA contract ontology in IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network is also proposed to provide users with a clear model to express their requirements and preferences. Moreover, we used the New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) Framework to model and analyze networks and services actions. To better understand the relationship and the projection of NGOSS Framework and IMS platform, we introduce an SLA management and monitoring architecture in IMS network.

Service level agreement specification for end‐to‐end IoT application ecosystems

SummaryWith an ever‐increasing variety and complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) applications delivered by increasing numbers of service providers, there is a growing demand for an automated mechanism that can monitor and regulate the interaction between the parties involved in IoT service provision and delivery. This mechanism needs to take the form of a contract, which, in this context, is referred to as a service level agreement (SLA). As a first step toward SLA monitoring and management, an SLA specification is essential. We believe that current SLA specification formats are unable to accommodate the unique characteristics of the IoT domain, such as its multilayered nature. Therefore, we propose a grammar for a syntactical structure of an SLA specification for IoT. The grammar is built based on a proposed conceptual model that considers the main concepts that can be used to express the requirements for hardware and software components of an IoT application on an end‐to‐end basis. We followed the goal question metric approach to evaluate the generality and expressiveness of the proposed grammar by reviewing its concepts and their predefined lists of vocabularies against two use cases with a considerable number of participants whose research interests are mainly related to IoT. The results of the analysis show that the proposed grammar achieved 91.70% of its generality goal and 93.43% of its expressiveness goal.

An Efficient Framework for a Third Party Auditor in Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract Cloud Service Providers supply services to clients in terms of their demands. They need to be constantly under monitoring for their services with respect to consensus agreements between clients and service providers. A Third Party Auditor or TPA as a trusted organization appears to be necessary to monitor executing agreements of cloud services. Using a third party as an extra component creates cost overheads for clients in a cloud environment. Thus, introducing a cost efficient framework for a cloud environment which includes a third party is an eminent achievement to make a TPA feasible and practical in cloud environments. In this paper, we propose a TPA framework for monitoring service level agreements between cloud service providers and cloud clients using several cloud resources. This framework employs different types of service deployments from various cloud service providers excluding the cloud service provider which is being monitored. Then, we demonstrate that the framework can mitigate costs of a third party auditor in a cloud environment. Simulations of trends for costs exhibits cost efficiency of at least forty percent over ten years when a TPA follows our proposed framework in comparison to other frameworks. Finally, we provide an analysis to compare characteristics of our framework with other frameworks and discuss the advantages of our proposed framework. Our results indicate that TPA as a component of the framework not only reduces overall costs of its presentation in a cloud environment but additionally improves management efficiency and security.

Dynamic changes of QoS parameters in cloud computing service level agreement

Service level agreement (SLA) in cloud computing can be defined as a contractual agreement signed between cloud user and cloud provider in order to manage the quality of service (QoS) parameters which are the fundamental part of SLAs. The current dynamic SLA monitoring approaches have considered the cloud provider's perspective only. To take into consideration the user's perspective; this research proposes a dynamic SLA monitoring approach by generating new SLA terms based on analysing the SLA penalties. A new proposed trade-off mechanism is applied between monthly cost and QoS guarantee values. Thus; we propose a dynamic model for updating QoS parameters of SLA in cloud environment. Java language is used with a QoS measurement dataset to experiment the proposed approach. The current Static SLA (SSLA) approaches are compared with the proposed Dynamic SLA (DSLA) approach. The results of this experimental study show that the number of SLA violations in DSLA are less than the number of SLA violations in SSLA.

Dynamic changes of QoS parameters in cloud computing service level agreement

Service level agreement (SLA) in cloud computing can be defined as a contractual agreement signed between cloud user and cloud provider in order to manage the quality of service (QoS) parameters which are the fundamental part of SLAs. The current dynamic SLA monitoring approaches have considered the cloud provider's perspective only. To take into consideration the user's perspective; this research proposes a dynamic SLA monitoring approach by generating new SLA terms based on analysing the SLA penalties. A new proposed trade-off mechanism is applied between monthly cost and QoS guarantee values. Thus; we propose a dynamic model for updating QoS parameters of SLA in cloud environment. Java language is used with a QoS measurement dataset to experiment the proposed approach. The current Static SLA (SSLA) approaches are compared with the proposed Dynamic SLA (DSLA) approach. The results of this experimental study show that the number of SLA violations in DSLA are less than the number of SLA violations in SSLA.

An Autonomic SLA Monitoring Framework Managed by Trusted Third Party in the Cloud Computing

This article describes how currently, service level agreements (SLAs) assurance forms one of the major challenges for cloud computing (CC) in order to guarantee quality of service (QoS) in real-time and control SLA violations. However, due to the highly dynamic nature of this open environment, it is important to have a binding agreement between all the service parties for ensuring trust while fulfilling the expected QoS. To properly operate and manage such complex situations, an effective and efficient monitoring is crucial. The participation of a trusted third party (TTP) is necessary in order to resolve conflicts between involved parties. This article proposes an autonomic SLA monitoring framework managed by TTP composed of two modules: the first one SLA establishment module, which aims at providing support for automated SLA generation and management. The second one, a service monitoring module to dynamically monitor QoS metrics by detecting SLA violations at runtime to verify compliances for the respective SLAs, and to propose a mechanism for an adaptive remedy rectification, as a contribution at the third maturity level of the autonomic computing paradigm as defined by IBM. The framework is validated with scenarios on response time and availability, the results obtained are promising. They confirm that this framework manages SLAs in an efficient way as it detects all violations to be communicated to concerned parties, and identifies particular penalty clauses that can be used to modify the reputation of a provider over time. The TTP framework equipped with such reputation module can provide real-time assessment for consumers informed decision making to continue using a service or to migrate to another service provider in the case of service degradation. This creates a fair competitiveness between providers and hence improves service performance and the reliability in the cloud.

Risk-based framework for SLA violation abatement from the cloud service provider’s perspective

The constant increase in the growth of the cloud market creates new challenges for cloud service providers. One such challenge is the need to avoid possible service level agreement (SLA) violations and their consequences through good SLA management. Researchers have proposed various frameworks and have made significant advances in managing SLAs from the perspective of both cloud users and providers. However, none of these approaches guides the service provider on the necessary steps to take for SLA violation abatement; that is, the prediction of possible SLA violations, the process to follow when the system identifies the threat of SLA violation, and the recommended action to take to avoid SLA violation. In this paper, we approach this process of SLA violation detection and abatement from a risk management perspective. We propose a Risk Management-based Framework for SLA violation abatement (RMF-SLA) following the formation of an SLA which comprises SLA monitoring, violation prediction and decision recommendation. Through experiments, we validate and demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework for assisting cloud providers to minimize possible service violations and penalties.

RSLA: An Approach for Managing Service Level Agreements in Cloud Environments

Cloud providers offer services at different levels of abstraction from infrastructure to applications. The quality of Cloud services is a key determinant of the overall service level a provider offers to its customers. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are (1) crucial for Cloud customers to ensure that promised levels of services are met, (2) an important sales instrument and (3) a differentiating factor for providers. Cloud providers and services are often selected more dynamically than in traditional IT services, and as a result, SLAs need to be set up and their monitoring implemented to match the same speed. In this context, managing SLAs is complex: different Cloud providers expose different management interfaces and SLA metrics differ from one provider to another. In this paper, we will analyze how IT service quality has been defined and managed over time, discuss how to manage SLAs in today’s multi-layer, multi-sourced Cloud environments, and what to expect going forward. A particular focus will be made on the rSLA framework that enables fast setup of SLA monitoring in dynamic and heterogeneous Cloud environments. The rSLA framework is made up of three main components: the rSLA language to formally represent SLAs, the rSLA Service, which interprets the SLAs and implements the behavior specified in them, and a set of Xlets-lightweight, dynamically bound adapters to monitoring and controlling interfaces. rSLA has been tested in the context of a real pilot and found to reduce the client on-boarding process from months to weeks.

Management of Service Level Agreements for Cloud Services in IoT: A Systematic Mapping Study

Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are computing technologies that provide services to consumers and businesses, allowing organizations to become more agile and flexible. Therefore, ensuring quality of service (QoS) through service-level agreements (SLAs) for such cloud-based services is crucial for both the service providers and service consumers. As SLAs are critical for cloud deployments and wider adoption of cloud services, the management of SLAs in cloud and IoT has thus become an important and essential aspect. This paper investigates the existing research on the management of SLAs in IoT applications that are based on cloud services. For this purpose, a systematic mapping study (a well-defined method) is conducted to identify the published research results that are relevant to SLAs. This paper identifies 328 primary studies and categorizes them into seven main technical classifications: SLA management, SLA definition, SLA modeling, SLA negotiation, SLA monitoring, SLA violation and trustworthiness, and SLA evolution. This paper also summarizes the research types, research contributions, and demographic information in these studies. The evaluation of the results shows that most of the approaches for managing SLAs are applied in academic or controlled experiments with limited industrial settings rather than in real industrial environments. Many studies focus on proposal models and methods to manage SLAs, and there is a lack of focus on the evolution perspective and a lack of adequate tool support to facilitate practitioners in their SLA management activities. Moreover, the scarce number of studies focusing on concrete metrics for qualitative or quantitative assessment of QoS in SLAs urges the need for in-depth research on metrics definition and measurements for SLAs.

Service Level Agreement (SLA) Enforcement: Is it Impactful?

Service Level Agreement (SLA) enforcement’s impact measure is a potential research area to be explored. Assumptions that this study is making are, SLA management will become better by a firm enforcement, which monitors and encourage every customer to be responsible to launch report of bugs or mischief of services such as unsatisfactory service quality or service unavailability to a collection pool where the provider react immediately (based on agreed terms) to address the complaints, so that the total DownTime (DT) will not exceeds the agreed SLA value. This study establishes fundamental theory to measure the enforcement impact based on automatic SLA monitoring and management.

Development of SLA Monitoring Tools Based on Proposed DMI in Cloud Computing

Service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between service provider and user about the quality of service (QoS) in cloud computing. The cost value and benefit value of SLA monitoring systems is a concerned issue in cloud computing. The trustable SLA monitoring model is important to assess SLA validation in cloud computing. The optimization of monitoring interval is another objective of study to economize SLA monitoring system. Therefore in this paper the SLA monitoring tools is developed to evaluate the proposed dynamic interval in actual testbed of cloud computing. The experiment design described in this paper presents the cloud configuration and environmental setup for testbed experiment.