Managing the Quality of Virtualized Services

Managing the quality of virtualized services that are delivered on the cloud is very challenging. Such services are often composed of smaller components that are assembled on an as-needed basis. In this paper, we propose a framework to measure and semi-automatically track quality delivered by a Virtualized service delivery system. The framework provides a mechanism to relate hard metrics typically measured at the backstage of the delivery process to quality related hard and soft metrics tracked at the front stage where the consumer interacts with the service. This allows administrators responsible for the functioning of a service to monitor its quality based on the measurements typically already done for the component services. The framework is general enough to be applied to any type of IT service. In the paper, we primarily concentrate on the Helpdesk service. We include the performance rules we have created by mining Helpdesk data.