Independently Auditing Service Level Agreements in the Grid

Service level management of Web and Grid Services is an important issue that has to be solved in order to achieve large-scale deployment of services. The need to negotiate, measure and audit the quality of the services provided (in terms, for instance, of performance, cost or security) will increase directly with the proliferation of services. This paper presents our on-going efforts towards developing an automatic and independent SLA (Service Level Agreement) auditing service to be used with Grid/Web Services. This solution has the goal of auditing services accurately without imposing a heavy performance penalty and solving or easing the trust issues. We present some issues involved in SLA auditing for Web/Grid Services, some possible solutions to these problems, presenting their advantages and drawbacks. Finally, we present a performance analysis of these scenarios.