Summary

This chapter outlines the important parts of a complete service level management system. Starting with a description of a large-scale Web services delivery architecture, it then shows the influences of that architecture on the design of service level management systems.

Critical influences are the constant demands for changing services, the use of multiple service providers and partners, elastic boundaries among teams and providers, demands for fast system management, and the need for mutually understandable data item definitions and event signaling mechanisms among the various pieces of the management system.

The generic management system outlined in Figure 3-2 is used as a reference model in the rest of the book. The parts of the generic management system consist of system instrumentation (fully described in Chapters 4 and 810), instrumentation management systems (described in Chapter 4), and the SLA statistics and reporting systems (described in Chapter 2) that use the data from instrumentation. The parts also consist of the real-time operations systems (event handling, Chapter 5; operations, Chapter 6; and policy, Chapter 7), along with long-term operations (load testing, Chapter 11; and system modeling and capacity planning, Chapter 12), and, finally, back-office operations, which are not further described in this book.