Monitoring middleware for service level agreements in heterogeneous environments

Abstract

Monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is required to determine if the Quality of Service (QoS) provided by a service provider satisfies the expectations of a service consumer. Although tools exist that can generate the software required to evaluate SLAs from the SLA specifications themselves, the code required to gather metric data is still predominantly coded by hand: a time consuming task. In this paper we describe an SLA monitoring implementation that can generate metric data gathering software directly from machine readable SLAs. Assuming that an organisation specialising in SLA monitoring and evaluation may not wish to be tied to any one particular middleware platform andlor SLA language, we aim to provide generic monitoring services that may be suitable for use in heterogeneous environments. We demonstrate the flexibility of our approach by providing monitoring solutions for observed systems implemented using Web Services and Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) middleware using a third party SLA language.