1 Abstract Service Level Management with Agent Technology

Abstract

The essential aspect of the global evaluation of a service is the opinion of the users of the service. The result of this evaluation expresses the users ‘ degrees of satisfaction [ITU94]. This paper will outline a generic evaluation methodology for multimedia applications like e-mailbased services, the World Wide Web (WWW), and real-time applications. It concentrates on the application layer and the services aspects. Principles of software evaluation can be used for quality assessment and measurement for networked services and distributed applications. A specific method for measuring important service characteristics is therefore presented. The method and the measurement procedure allows to compare the actual characteristics of service quality with the required characteristics and thresholds. The approach can easily and efficiently be implemented in any organization with other applications too. The proof of concepts will be made by the implementation of quality measurement agents following the quality assessment and measurement methodology for different distributed applications outlined in this paper. Our approach of performing service level management with agent technology is distributed, slim, minimizable to the maximum, and independent in its methodology. Finally it offers comparable, objective results. This paper is not about [M.3010] or [X.711]. It is for end users and (competing) service providers trying to get comparable measurement results by applying common measurement methods and by concentrating on a well-defined subset of quality characteristics