Service Level Agreement monitoring as a service: an independent monitoring service for Service Level Agreements in clouds

Cloud network is rapidly growing due to massive increase in interconnected devices and the emergence of different technologies such as the Internet of things, fog computing and artificial intelligence. In response, cloud computing needs reliable dealings among the service providers, brokers and consumers. The existing cloud monitoring frameworks such as Amazon Cloud Watch, Paraleap Azure Watch, and Rack Space Cloud Kick work under the control of service providers. They work fine, however, this may create dissatisfaction among customers over Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. Customers dissatisfaction may drastically drop the businesses of service providers. To cope with the above mentioned issue and get in line with cloud philosophy, Monitoring as a Service, completely independent in nature, is needed for observing and regulating the cloud businesses. However, the existing MaaS frameworks do not address the comprehensive SLA for customer satisfaction and penalties management. This paper proposes a reliable framework by adopting third party monitoring services with clearcut SLA and penalties management. Since, this framework monitors SLA as a cloud monitoring service, it is named as Service Level Agreement Monitoring as a Service (SLA-MaaS). On violations, it penalizes those who are found in breach of terms and condition enlisted in SLA. Simulation results confirmed that the proposed framework adequately satisfy the customers (as well as service providers). This helps in developing a trust worthy relationship among cloud partners and increase customer attention and retention