Service level management definition, architecture, and research challenges

Commercial approaches to service level agreements (SLA) management sometimes appear to be fragmented. In this sort of situation, a general framework that subsumes piecemeal approaches does much good. We provide a framework that may serve as a baseline against which one can situate and evaluate SLA proposals. We provide (i) definitions which lead to the broader concept of service level management (SLM), (ii) a general SLM methodology, (iii) research challenges in SLM, and (iv) an SLM architecture. As such, the paper is a tutorial paper concerning current practices and outstanding issues in service level management.