Automation of Service Level Agreement based on Active SLA

Abstract As demand for IT services increase, which are based on SOA and cloud computing, service level agreements (SLAs) have received more attention in the parties concerned. An SLA is usually a paper contract written in natural language. SLA management tools which are commercially available, implement SLAs implicitly in the application with a procedural language. This makes automation of SLA management difficult. It is also laborious to maintain contract management systems because changes in a contract give rise to extensive modifications in the source code. We see the source of the trouble is the existence of documentary SLAs (paper contracts) and corresponding executable SLAs (contracts coded in the procedural language). In this paper, to resolve the current SLA management problems we propose an active SLM (Active Service Level Management) system, which is based on the active SLA (Active Service Level Agreement). In the proposed system, the separated management and processing of dual SLAs can be unified into a single process with the introduction of active SLAs (ASLAs).