Unifying service level management using an MDA-based approach

Service level management (SLM) has gained more and more importance in the past few years. One of the biggest challenges is the integration of emerging new technologies such as Web services. A large number of different SLM approaches has been proposed which complicates an efficient SLM. This paper describes an SLM approach that is based on the model driven architecture (MDA). The first step is to specify abstract reusable SLA patterns which are bound later to a concrete management platform and are finally physically deployed into the managed environment. This approach benefits from the advantages of the MDA and provides a mechanism for transforming SLA patterns for different SLA management platforms. Our approach has been prototypically implemented for the Web services level agreement (WSLA) environment.