On tool support for Service Level Management: From requirements to system specifications

Service level management (SLM) is a vital discipline in customer-oriented IT service management. Covering technical as well as organizational and economic aspects, this multi-dimensional management area has become even more important against the background of the business-driven IT management (BDIM) paradigm. Today, tools and management solutions available for SLM face three major challenges: First, the lack of an established platform-independent model (PIM) for SLM entails the existence of hard- to-integrate "islands" of support tools and makes an integrated approach to SLM tool support all but impossible. Secondly, the current solutions are mostly focused on SLA-speciflc issues, neglecting significant SLM responsibilities such as the deployment of service catalogs. Lastly, the limited perspective of many existing SLM solutions disregards the important links between SLM-related management tasks and those of other management disciplines such as fault or performance management. This paper presents first results of ongoing research aiming at developing a practicable, integrated solution for SLM, addressing above mentioned challenges. To this end, essential requirements are pointed out, and four common modules of a management architecture for SLM are outlined.