Automatic Extraction of Metrics from SLAs for Cloud Service Management

Abstract

To effectively manage cloud based services, organizations need to continuously monitor the performance metrics listed in the Cloud service contracts. However, these legal documents, like Service Level Agreements (SLA) or privacy policy documents, are currently managed as plain text files meant principally for human consumption. Additionally, providers often define their own performance metrics for their services. These factors hinder the automation of SLA management and require manual effort to monitor the cloud service performance. We have significantly automated the process of extracting, managing and monitoring cloud SLA using natural language processing techniques and Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we describe our technical approach and the ontology that we have developed to describe, manage, and reason about cloud SLAs. We also describe the prototype system that we have developed to automatically extract information from legal Terms of Service that are available on cloud provider websites.