Monitoring Services Quality in the Cloud

Due to the dynamic nature of cloud computing environments, continuous monitoring of the quality of cloud services is needed in order to satisfy business goals and enforce service-level agreements (SLAs). Current approaches for SLA specifications in IT services are not sufficient since SLAs are usually based on templates that are expressed in a natural language, making automated compliance verification and assurance tasks difficult. In such a context, the use of models at runtime becomes particularly relevant: such models can help retrieve data from the running system to verify SLA compliance and if the desired quality levels are not achieved, drive the dynamic reconfiguration of the cloud services architecture.