Secure Monitoring of Service Level Agreements

Abstract

Abstract-Service Level Agreements (SLA) are commonly used to define terms and conditions of service provisioning. WS-Agreement1 is an SLA specification that addresses the need of both producers and consumers of services to specify and negotiate terms and conditions of access to these services. This specification has gained wide acceptance in both the Grid computing and Web Services communities. WS-Agreement includes support for both negotiating and specifying penalties that arise from violation of these terms and conditions. It does not, however, include support for monitoring these agreements to determine if any such violations have occurred and, if so, determining which parties are responsible. This paper proposes a framework and design for secure and reliable monitoring of WS-Agreement specified SLAs. Modifications to WS-Agreement are necessary for effective monitoring. These modifications are outlined, along with an implementation of the framework in the AgentScape middleware system.

SecAgreement: Advancing Security Risk Calculations in Cloud Services

“…Clark et al [11] incorporate their SLA management framework into WS-Agreement specified SLAs by modifying the underlying agreement schema. They insert additional elements into SDTs (see Section III.B) to allow services to be monitored by trusted third parties.…”

“…Much cloud research has focused on understanding on how best to manage and monitor SLAs to detect when SLOs are violated [10][11][12]. Clark et al [11] incorporate their SLA management framework into WS-Agreement specified SLAs by modifying the underlying agreement schema.…”

Negotiation and Monitoring of Service Level Agreements

“…For example, the SLA framework in AgentScape [10] has been extended to support monitoring and penalty enforcement [3]. A trusted monitoring module is required to measure the provided services and ensure that the GTs in the SLA are being fulfilled by both parties.…”

“…In this paper, a number of recent proposals (from [3,8,12,13]) in the area of service violations and penalities negotiation, as well as suggesting approaches that could be used to support renegotiation of SLAs during enactment. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 discusses WSAgreement and how it can be used to formulate agreements between clients and providers.…”

“…Furthermore, some work has focused on actually identifying how SLOs may be impacted by the choice of specific penalty clauses [3,12,13]. A trusted mediator may be necessary to resolve conflicts between involved parties.…”