A Middleware Solution to Monitoring Composite Web Services-Based Processes

Web services can be composed to create complex business processes that span multiple organizations. quality of service (QoS) of such a process is guaranteed by a set of service level agreements (SLAs) between the service providers and the service consumers. Monitoring is required at every service provider and at the service consumer end in order to ensure satisfaction of the SLAs. Distributed monitoring of business processes can be complex and costly. We propose a middleware solution, namely the performance monitor (PM) framework, to enable outsourcing of the task of SLA monitoring of both intra and inter-organizational composite Web service processes. We present a prototype implementation of the PM with experimental data to establish the effectiveness of the framework in monitoring and verifying SLAs for a composite process and discuss possible extensions to the framework for more generalized applications.