Service Level Agreements Templates Research Articles

Adaptive Mechanism Model for the Prevention of SLA Violation in the Context of COPD Patient Monitoring

In this paper, we introduce a new kind of Service Level Agreement(SLA) Template to better control dynamically quality of medical monitoring platform service. Our approach is based on Health care system and Health Information Technology (HIT) research area, specifically the field of telemonitoring system for patients who suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). According to WHO statistics, COPD is the third leading cause of death worldwide. To this end, several solutions or platforms exist today to monitor COPD. Most of these platforms manage large volume of patient data. This can bring about quality and lost data problems. To address these issues, control mechanisms must be proposed and designed to improve the quality of service (QoS) on these platforms. A platform with continuously monitored QoS can save patients’ lives and reduce data quality risk. In this article, we propose an ontology that uses SLAs data from COPD monitoring platforms with dynamic data from a patient context. We dynamically calculate the number of patient data incidents and the number of service request incidents from two dynamic contexts: SLA and the patient context. If the number of incidents is higher than what is expected in the SLA, then alerts are sent to the interface parties in real time. Finally, the contribution of this article is the proposed virtual SLA template to better control SLA violation and improve quality of medical monitoring platforms services.

Adaptive SLA mechanism based on fuzzy system for dynamic cloud environment

ABSTRACT The volatile nature of Cloud user’s needs is considered a worthy challenge in formulating the Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation. The sterility of the standard SLA templates in handling the diversity in the users’ requirements motives the concept of the dynamic SLA. Establishing the SLA contract is mainly based on converting the user’s QoS requirements into a meaningful Service Level Objectives (SLO) during the negotiation phase, but in case of modification in these QoS requirements especially during the run-time, the current negotiation may be violated and the provider may resort to terminate the current negotiation and re-establish it. This paper presents a novel methodology based on arithmetic and fuzzy logic model to establish a dynamic SLA’s Negotiation system commensurate with the dynamic aspects of the Cloud environment. The proposed negotiation system mainly based on defining pre-conditions and decisions to modify only the required SLO at the run-time without completely hang-up the SLA.

Dynamic Search Engine Platform for Cloud Service Level Agreements Using Semantic Annotation

This article describes how cloud applications are negotiated, deployed, monitored, evaluated and terminated through the service level agreements (SLA). The service definition & their objectives, performance measures, pricing, roles of the involved parties are stated as part of the SLA. Searching for SLA templates from the provider's place is considered as a cumbersome process for the consumer. Also, it is not guaranteed that retrieved SLAs always match with the consumer requirements. Hence, semantic search engine platforms for cloud SLA using a novel architecture are introduced here. SLA agreements are crawled from the web and annotation is performed in the agreement terms using SLA ontologies to fasten and improve the accuracy of the search process. In the proposed architecture, 3 ontologies are developed for SaaS, PaaS and IaaS as well as 140 SLA documents are gathered. Results revealed that the search efficacy is almost 90% in finding the desired SLA for the consumer to ease negotiation. Moreover, the performance is compared with similar search engine GoNTogle, and it was observed that proposed model produced good results.

An Automated Semantic Negotiation for Cloud Service Level Agreements

Mostly, cloud agreements are signed between the consumer and the provider using online click-through agreements. Several issues and conflicts exist in the negotiation of cloud agreement terms due to the legal and ambiguous terms in Service Level Agreements (SLA). Semantic knowledge applied during the formation and negotiation of SLA can overcome these issues. Cloud SLA negotiation consists of numerous activities such as formation of SLA templates, publishing it in registry, verification and validation of SLA, monitoring for violation, logging and reporting and termination. Though these activities are interleaved with each other, semantic synchronization is still lacking. To overcome this, a novel SLA life cycle using semantic knowledge to automate the cloud negotiation has been formulated. Semantic web platform using ontologies is designed, developed and evaluated. The resultant platform increases the task efficiency of the consumer and the provider during negotiation. Precision and recall scores for Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) SLAs were calculated. And it reveals that applying semantic knowledge helps the extraction of meaningful answers from the cloud actors.

CSLAT: an SLA template for cloud service management

Service level agreements (SLAs) are used to bind cloud provider for providing services and hence to assure cloud consumer that delivered services are up to the mark. However, most of the cloud SLAs are either static in nature or are concerned only for availability of service leaving major concerns such as performance, security, metering and monitoring, automation, and many more. In this paper, we have reviewed the existing SLA frameworks and then examined their suitability in the context of cloud computing. Next, we discuss the desirable components, which should be considered in cloud SLA. Also, we have identified different parameters that need to be incorporated in each component. Based on this, we put forward a cloud SLA template, which we termed as cloud service level agreement template (CSLAT). This work attempts to provide a clear and formal definition of decisive parameters in cloud computing. The definition will give clear perception of how these parameters should be specified in SLA, so as to avoid any conflict rising due to ambiguity in it. Further, precise monitoring and QoS measurement can be done using the mathematical interpretations given corresponding to parameters. Thus, proposed CSLAT will help in automation of SLA management in cloud computing.

A survey on service quality description

Quality of service (QoS) can be a critical element for achieving the business goals of a service provider, for the acceptance of a service by the user, or for guaranteeing service characteristics in a composition of services, where a service is defined as either a software or a software-support (i.e., infrastructural) service which is available on any type of network or electronic channel. The goal of this article is to compare the approaches to QoS description in the literature, where several models and metamodels are included. consider a large spectrum of models and metamodels to describe service quality, ranging from ontological approaches to define quality measures, metrics, and dimensions, to metamodels enabling the specification of quality-based service requirements and capabilities as well as of SLAs (Service-Level Agreements) and SLA templates for service provisioning. Our survey is performed by inspecting the characteristics of the available approaches to reveal which are the consolidated ones and which are the ones specific to given aspects and to analyze where the need for further research and investigation lies. The approaches here illustrated have been selected based on a systematic review of conference proceedings and journals spanning various research areas in computer science and engineering, including: distributed, information, and telecommunication systems, networks and security, and service-oriented and grid computing.

Cost–benefit analysis of an SLA mapping approach for defining standardized Cloud computing goods

Due to the large variety in computing resources and, consequently, the large number of different types of service level agreements (SLAs), computing resource markets face the problem of a low market liquidity. Restricting the number of different resource types to a small set of standardized computing resources seems to be the appropriate solution to counteract this problem. Standardized computing resources are defined through an SLA template. An SLA template defines the structure of an SLA, the service attributes, the names of the service attributes, and the service attribute values. However, since existing research results have only introduced static SLA templates so far, the SLA templates cannot reflect changes in user needs and market structures. To address this shortcoming, we present a novel approach of adaptive SLA matching. This approach adapts SLA templates based on SLA mappings of users. It allows Cloud users to define mappings between a public SLA template, which is available in the Cloud market, and their private SLA templates, which are used for various in-house business processes of the Cloud user. Besides showing how public SLA templates are adapted to the demand of Cloud users, we also analyze the costs and benefits of this approach. Costs are incurred every time a user has to define a new SLA mapping to a public SLA template due to its adaptation. In particular, we investigate how the costs differ with respect to the public SLA template adaptation method. The simulation results show that the use of heuristics within adaptation methods allows balancing the costs and benefits of the SLA mapping approach.

An Appropriate Violation Detection Scenario for Service Level Agreements Based on WS-Agreement Protocol

Nowadays relations between service providers and customers are set in the service level agreement templates. SLA sometimes is called as service level warranty helps to reach to a common vision about the service, quality of service warranty, priorities, responsibilities and etc in which parties agrees on it. The most important topic in service level agreement is survey management and violation detection in the provisions of SLA. In this paper we have used WS-Agreement protocol which provides standard templates for SLA management in order to design and model an appropriate workflow scenario and required subsystems regarding to Violation management in Service Level agreements. Then in this paper we add evaluation phase for completed violations of service level agreement management and then evaluation phase modeling in eTom architecture.

On Leveraging Policy-Based Management for Maximizing Business Profit

This paper presents a systematic approach to business and policy driven refinement. It also discusses an implementation of an application-hosting service level agreement (SLA) use case. We make use of a simple application hosting SLA template, for which we derive a low-level policy-based service level specification (SLS). The SLS policy set is then analyzed for static consistency and runtime efficiency. The Static Analysis phase involves several consistency tests introduced to detect and correct errors in the original SLS. The Dynamic analysis phase considers the runtime dynamics of policy execution as part of the policy refinement process. This latter phase aims at optimizing the business profit of the service provider. Through mathematical approximation, we derive three policy scheduling algorithms. The algorithms are then implemented and compared against random and first come first served (FCFS) scheduling. This paper shows, in addition to the systematic refinement process, the importance of analyzing the dynamics of a policy management solution before it is actually implemented. The simulations have been performed using the VS Policy Simulator tool.

VieSLAF Framework: Facilitating Negotiations in Clouds by applying service mediation and negotiation bootstrapping

Cloud computing represents a novel and promising computing paradigm where computing resources have to be allocated to software for their execution. Self-manageable Cloud infrastructures are required in order to achieve that level of flexibility on one hand, and to comply to users' requirements specified by means of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on the other. However, many assumptions in Cloud markets are old fashioned assuming same market conditions as for example in computational Grids. One such assumptions is that service provider and consumer have matching SLA templates and common understanding of the negotiated terms or that they provide public templates, which can be downloaded and utilized by the end users. Moreover, current Cloud negotiation systems have based themselves on common protocols and languages that are known to the participants beforehand. Matching SLA templates and a-priori knowledge about the negotiation terms and protocols between partners are unrealistic assumption in Cloud markets where participants meet on demand and on a case by case basis. In this paper we present VieSLAF, a novel framework for the specification and management of SLA mappings and meta-negotiations facilitating service mediation and negotiation bootstrapping in Clouds. Using VieSLAF users may specify, manage, and apply SLA mappings bridging the gap between non-matching SLA templates without a-priori knowledge about negotiation protocols, required security standards or negotiated terms. We exemplify two case studies where VieSLAF represents an important contribution towards the development of open and liquid Cloud markets.