Definition of Metric Dependencies for Monitoring the Impact of Quality of Services on Quality of Processes

Abstract

Service providers have to monitor the quality of offered services and to ensure the compliance of service levels provider and requester agreed on. Thereby, a service provider should notify a service requester about violations of service level agreements (SLAs). Furthermore, the provider should point to impacts on affected processes in which services are invoked. For that purpose, a model is needed to define dependencies between quality of processes and quality of invoked services. In order to measure quality of services and to estimate impacts on the quality of processes, we focus on measurable metrics related to functional elements of processes, services as well as components implementing services. Based on functional dependencies between processes and services of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), we define metric dependencies for monitoring the impact of quality of invoked services on quality of affected processes. In this paper we discuss how to derive metric dependency definitions from functional dependencies by applying dependency patterns, and how to map metric and metric dependency definitions to an appropriate monitoring architecture.