Defining and Observing the Compliance of Service Level Agreements: A Model Driven Approach

IT Service Management (ITSM) is the set of processes that allow planning, organizing, directing and controlling the provisioning of IT services. Among the concerns of ITSM, namely within the service level management process, are the requirements for services availability, performance, accuracy, capacity and security, which are specified in terms of service-level agreements (SLA). SLA definition and monitoring are open issues within the ITSM domain. This paper overviews an ongoing research initiative concerned with three specific problems in this context: (1) SLAs in the context of ITSM are informally specified in natural language, (2) SLAs specifications are not grounded on models of ITSM processes, (3) SLAs compliance verification in IT services is not performed at the same level of abstraction as service design. To mitigate those problems, we propose a model-based approach to IT services SLA specification and compliance verification. The specification part will be based on a SLA language - a domain specific language (DSL) for defining quality attributes as non functional requirements (NFRs) in the context of ITSM. Its metamodel will be an extension of the metamodel of the adopted process modeling language. As such, it will be possible to ground SLA definition on the corresponding IT service model constructs. SLA monitoring and compliance validation will occur at the same abstraction level as service specification, therefore being understood by all stakeholders.