A Framework for Multi-level SLA Management

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) represent an architectural shift for building business applications based on loosely-coupled services. In a multi-layered SOA environment the exact conditions under which services are to be delivered can be formally specified by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, typical SLAs are just specified at the customer-level and do not allow service providers to manage their IT stack accordingly as they have no insight on how customer-level SLAs translate to metrics or parameters at the various layers of the IT stack. In this paper we present a technical architecture for a multi-level SLA management framework. We discuss the fundamental components and interfaces in this architecture and explain the developed integrated framework. Furthermore, we show results from a qualitative evaluation of the framework in the context of an open reference case.