SLA-driven management of distributed systems using the common information model

We present a novel approach of using CIM for the SLA-driven management of distributed systems and discuss our implementation experiences. Supported by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short term business relationships across different service provider boundaries. Such dynamic structures will only be successful if the obligations of different providers with respect to the quality of the offered services can be unambiguously specified and enforced by means of dynamic Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In other words, the management of SLAs needs to become as dynamic as the underlying infrastructure for which they are defined. Our previous work has shown that Web Services, as a typical example for a service-oriented architecture, can be extended in a straightforward way for defining and monitoring SLAs. However, SLAs defined for a Web Services environment need to take into account the underlying managed resources whose management interfaces are defined based on traditional management architectures, such as SNMP-based management or the Common Information Model (CIM). As a solution to this problem, the approach presented in this paper addresses the integration problem of how to transform a Web Services SLA so that it can be understood and enforced by a service provider whose management system is based on a traditional management architecture, such as CIM.