SLA Management System
The SLA monitor mechanism is used to specifically observe the runtime performance of cloud services to ensure that they are fulfilling the contractual QoS requirements published in SLAs (Figure 1). The data collected by the SLA monitor is processed by an SLA management system to be aggregated into SLA reporting metrics. This system can proactively repair or failover cloud services when exception conditions occur, such as when the SLA monitor reports a cloud service as "down."
Figure 1 - A cloud service consumer interacts with a cloud service (1). An SLA monitor intercepts the exchanged messages, evaluates the interaction, and collects relevant runtime data in relation to quality-of-service guarantees defined in the cloud service's SLA (2A). The data collected is stored in a repository (2B) that is part of the SLA management system (3). Queries can be issued and reports can be generated for an external cloud resource administrator via a usage and administration portal (4) or for an internal cloud resource administrator via the SLA management system's native user-interface (5).