Monitoring of Service Level Agreements with

flexible and extensible Agents

Rainer Hauck Helmut Reiser


Munich Network Management Team
University of Munich, Dept. of CS
Oettingenstr. 67
D-80538 Munich, Germany
Phone: +49-89-2178-{2155|2163}, Fax: -2262
E-Mail: {hauck|reiser}@informatik.uni-muenchen.de

Abstract:

In a customer/provider relationship a provider offers services to users who pay for using them. To control service delivery certain Quality of Service (QoS) parameters have to be agreed through so called Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Monitoring of some of these QoS parameters only makes sense when done from the customer site. In a cooperation project we developed a flexible and extensible agent for that purpose using the Java Dynamic Management Kit (JDMK) and the Application Response Measurement (ARM) API. Based on our experiences with the prototype implementation this paper analyses the suitability of JDMK and ARM for the monitoring of SLAs and for building scalable and flexible management systems in large-scale enterprise networks.

Keywords:
Service Level Management, JDMK, ARM, Distributed Management, Management by Delegation