Declarative Specification of Service Management Attributes

Providers, operators and customers understand that the concept of an IT service offers a beneficial abstraction from actual IT operations, effectively encapsulating the provisioning of the service. Yet, IT services are in fact provided by installations composed of very large numbers of managed elements. Hence, management of a service implies the management of the multitude of elements and sub-services upon which the service relies. The mapping of a service's attributes onto resources to "make the service visible" is as much of a challenge as the execution of service management actions (i.e. actions directed at a service) on the underlying infrastructure. Even today, practical solutions to these issues are scarce. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the synthesis of service attributes to create the foundation for a service management information base. We present a declarative language suitable for the representation of service attributes in dependence of management attributes of the provisioning infrastructure. In addition, we discuss a service monitoring architecture driven by service attribute specifications.