Self-adaptive Service Monitoring

Online marketplaces are emerging in which services are provided and consumed. Parties make online agreements regarding the terms and conditions of service provisioning. For certain kinds of services, it may be necessary to know whether it is being provisioned according to the agreement. To this end, the service may be monitored. For instance, a web application service may be monitored to guarantee that the response time of the application is within acceptable limits. The decision of whether or not to monitor a service is correlated to the perceived level of risk that a violation will occur. If there is a low level of perceived risk, monitoring may not be required, and vice versa. The perceived level of risk associated with a service transaction can change over time. However, traditional monitoring techniques are not able to react to this change. This paper proposes a self-adaptive service monitor that adapts to changes in the perceived level of risk. This monitor combines a traditional service monitor with a self-monitoring protocol, referred to as passive monitoring. This monitor is implemented in the AgentScape Middleware.