Describing and Verifying Monitoring Capabilities for Service Based Systems

Monitoring the operation of Service Based Systems (SBS) to ensure compliance with a set of service level agreements (SLAs) for example cannot always rely on a pre-specified monitoring infrastructure, where all the information and components required for monitoring are a priori known and available. This because new services with unknown monitoring infrastructures and capabilities may be dynamically assembled to an SBS. To address the need for dynamic configuration of SBS monitoring infrastructures, this paper proposes a model for describing the monitoring capabilities of different services of an SBS and discusses the process for verifying the monitorability of required properties based on these capabilities

Dynamic set-up of monitoring infrastructures for service based systems

Service based systems are intrinsically dynamic as the services deployed by them can be replaced at runtime. When this happens, the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that regulate the provision of services may also need to change. Following such changes, the monitoring infrastructure that is used to monitor SLAs may also need to be modified to ensure the continuous provision of the necessary runtime checks. This paper presents a framework that supports the dynamic assessment of the monitorability of SLAs terms and the dynamic setup of an appropriate infrastructure for monitoring them following such changes. The monitorability checks are based on comparisons between the SLA terms for specific services and descriptions of the monitoring capabilities of these services which are expressed in languages introduced in the paper. The paper presents a prototype implementation of the framework and the results of a preliminary evaluation of it

A Framework for Hierarchical and Recursive Monitoring of Service Based Systems

Runtime monitoring of Service Based Systems (SBSs) usually relies on information derived from I/O messages exchanged within business processes implementing services. When service provisioning is regulated by complex Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between service requesters, (composed) services, and infrastructure providers, monitoring may require additional features, such as (i) coordination among events captured at different sources involved in service provisioning and (ii) delegation of properties monitoring to local sites. This paper discusses an architecture and engagement protocol supporting the two aforementioned requirements for monitoring complex SLA-driven service provisioning

Lifelong personal health data and application software via virtual machines in the cloud

Personal Health Records (PHRs) should remain the lifelong property of patients, who should be able to show them conveniently and securely to selected caregivers and institutions. In this paper, we present MyPHRMachines, a cloud-based PHR system taking a radically new architectural solution to health record portability. In MyPHRMachines, health-related data and the application software to view and/or analyze it are separately deployed in the PHR system. After uploading their medical data to MyPHRMachines, patients can access them again from remote virtual machines that contain the right software to visualize and analyze them without any need for conversion. Patients can share their remote virtual machine session with selected caregivers, who will need only a Web browser to access the pre-loaded fragments of their lifelong PHR. We discuss a prototype of MyPHRMachines applied to two use cases, i.e., radiology image sharing and personalized medicine

MyPHRMachines : personal health desktops in the cloud

Personal Health Records (PHRs) should remain the lifelong property of patients, who should be enabled to show them conveniently and securely to selected caregivers and institutions. Current solutions for PHRs focus on standard data exchange formats and transformations to move data across health information systems. In this paper we present MyPHRMachines, a PHR system taking a radically new architectural solution to health record interoperability. In MyPHRMachines, health-related data and the application software to view and/or analyze it are separately deployed in the PHR system. After uploading their medical data to MyPHRMachines, patients can access them again from remote virtual machines that contain the right software to visualize and analyze them without any conversion. Patients can share their remote virtual machine session with selected caregivers, who will need only aWeb browser to access the pre-loaded fragments of their lifelong PHR. We discuss a prototype of MyPHRMachines applied to two use cases, i.e. radiology image sharing and personalized medicine. The first use case demonstrates the ability of patients to build robust PHRs across the space and time dimensions, whereas the second use case demonstrates the ability of MyPHRMachines to preserve the privacy of PHR data deployed in the cloud

Customized Infrastructures for Monitoring Business Processes

Process enactment technology provides native tools and add-ons for monitoring, such as APIs and monitoring consoles, which are usually highly entangled with the underlying process enactment logic and not customizable by process users. In such a case, all users access the same set of monitoring data and functions and process management resources may be allocated for monitoring concerns not of interest for users. In this context, we present a model and a tool for customized process monitoring infrastructures executing on top of existing process enactment technology. The model classifies the options about monitoring over which the preferences of process users may diverge. The tool implements the proposed model, generating customized process monitoring infrastructures embedding the business logic of the monitoring options chosen by process users

Optimized cross-organizational business process monitoring: Design and enactment

Organizations can implement the agility required to survive in the rapidly evolving business landscape by focusing on their core business and engaging in collaborations with other partners. This entails the need for organizations to monitor the behavior of the partners with which they collaborate. The design and enactment of monitoring, in this scenario, must become flexible and adapt as the collaboration evolves. We propose an approach to flexibly design and enact cross-organizational business process monitoring based on Product-Based Workflow Design. Our approach allows organizations to capture monitoring requirements, optimize such requirements, e.g. choosing the monitoring process with lowest cost or highest availability, and enacting the optimal monitoring process through a service-oriented approach. Optimization, in particular, is made efficient by adopting an Ant-colony optimization heuristic. The paper also describes a prototypical implementation of our approach in the ProM framework

Establishing and Monitoring SLAs in complex Service Based Systems

In modern service economies, service provisioning needs to be regulated by complex SLA hierarchies among providers of heterogeneous services, defined at the business, software, and infrastructure layers. Starting from the SLA Management framework defined in the SLA@SOI EU FP7 Integrated Project, we focus on the relationship between establishment and monitoring of such SLAs, showing how the two processes become tightly interleaved in order to provide meaningful mechanisms for SLA management. We first describe the process for SLA establishment adopted within the framework; then, we propose an architecture for monitoring established SLAs, which satisfies the two main requirements introduced by SLA establishment: the availability of historical data for evaluating SLA offers and the assessment of the capability to monitor the terms in a SLA offer

MyPHRMachines: Lifelong Personal Health Records in the Cloud

Personal Health Records (PHRs) should remain the lifelong property of patients and should be showable conveniently and securely to selected caregivers. Regarding interoperability, current solutions for PHRs focus on standard data exchange formats and transformations to move data across health information systems. In this paper we propose MyPHRMachines, a patient-centric system that takes a radically new architectural solution to health record interoperability. We propose to deploy besides the medical data also the related software to the PHR system. After uploading their medical data to MyPHRMachines, patients can access them again from remote virtual machines that contain the right software to visualize and analyze them without any conversion. Patients can share their remote virtual machine session with a selected health provider, who will need only a Web browser to access the pre-loaded fragments of the lifelong PHR. We illustrate how our prototype already supports the use case of a real-world patient and discuss the research agenda required to translate this prototype into a viable solution for the international healthcare industry

Addressing health information privacy with a novel cloud-based PHR system architecture

Patient Health Records (PHRs) shift the ownership of health data from health providers to patients. Such a shift poses important challenges from the data privacy point of view. Patients would like to be able to selectively reveal information to other stakeholders and, at the same time, be assured that their health information will not be used improperly once shared. Current PHR systems partially fail to satisfy these requirements. In this paper, we show that both requirements can be satisfied fully when adopting a novel cloud-based PHR system architecture.We expain the role of remote virtual machines in this architecture and use interaction models to reason about privacy implications. Finally, we evaluate MyPHRMachines, a prototypical implementation of the architecture: we demonstrate that the system enables the execution of third party genome analysis services on patientowned genome data while ensuring that (1) such services cannot maliciously store this data and (2) patients can show the analysis results to experts without sharing along their full genome