Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Software and performance - WOSP '07
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Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) mitigate the risks of a service-provision scenario by associating financial penalties with aberrant service behaviour. SLAs are useless if their provisions can be unilaterally ignored by a party without incurring any liability. To avoid this, it is necessary to en- sure that each party's conformance to its obligations can be monitored by the other parties. We introduce a technique for analysing systems of SLAs to determine the degree of monitorability possible. We apply this technique to iden- tify the most monitorable system of SLAs governing time- liness for a three-role Application-Service Provision (ASP) scenario. The system contains SLAs that are at best mu- tually monitorable, implying the requirement for reconcilia- tion of monitoring data between the parties, and hence the need to constrain the parties to report honestly while accom- modating unavoidable measurement error. We describe the design of a fair constraint on the precision and accuracy of reported measurements, and its approximate monitorability using a statistical hypothesis test.