Current service level agreements (SLAs) between service providers and their customers are English-language documents that often deal only with the availability of the contracted services. Formalizing these agreements as electronic service level agreements (eSLA) and extending the scope of SLAs to capture additional IT resource level concerns, make it possible for the system management software at each of the parties to directly monitor and enforce these agreements. We focus on the agreement information to be captured in an eSLA that describes services and their resource requirements, tools and supporting services in forming an eSLA, and a concrete web hosting example to demonstrate the deployment and enforcement of the eSLA for managing network bandwidth. We have prototyped this service example along with the tools for creation and deployment of an eSLA. Finally, we have devised an XML DTD for eSLA definition.
By: Robert Kearney, Richard King, Martin Sachs, Asit Dan, Daniel Dias
Published in: RC22071 in 2001
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