SARA: A tool for service levels — Aware contracts

The evolution of IT management towards a more customer-centric approach has shifted IT managers perspective from the IT department´s traditional point of view to the final user perception. We can state that IT department horizon line has been shifted from the business border to the end user frontier. Therefore IT managers are more and more focused on services seen in the end-to-end perspective. In order to support IT managers in designing services that can be guaranteed at the end users, we propose SARA, a tool for mapping contracts over end-to-end service chains. SARA aims to support IT managers for assessing the actual coverage of obligations with respect to the service they must provide to final users. In this way IT managers are allowed to calculate SLAs they can guarantee, given a set of already signed service contracts, and to evaluate the impact of contract variations on the service levels deployed to the final users.