A quality model for analysing web service monitoring tools

Web Services are becoming the cornerstone of modern service-based software applications. Their adequacy to a particular context of use is expressed by means of a service level agreement, written in terms of quality of service's attributes (like response time, availability, etc.). To perform a continuous and accurate assessment of the real quality of service and thus the fulfillment of the service level agreement, monitoring tools for web services have come into play. Each of these tools exhibits its own characteristics that can make it more adequate than others in a concrete situation. The purpose of this paper is to describe these characteristics using the concept of quality model. To do so, we first consider web service monitoring tools in context, by identifying other types of tool they interact with; we then systematically build the quality model by applying a method that has this specific purpose; and last we briefly apply the model to evaluate some exemplar monitoring tools. The paper focuses on commercial web service monitoring tools.