2.0 SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE
A layered Service Level Management (SLM) architecture recognizes the many management functionality requirements, goals and policies of every customer and presents them in a single management view. It then performs the many and varied management functions through cooperative management entities, working together in a collaborative manner to achieve consistent, high availability, service level management objectives.
Inherent values of a layered Service Level Management architecture include (you will want to create your own details around these bullets):
o Extending the traditional centralized manager/agent model to a hierarchical manager/manager/agent paradigm.
o Supporting distributed collaborative processing all the while dedicating management components to the IT infrastructure.
o Hide the complexity of distributed management activities by providing a centralized management view.
o Guaranteeing consistency through policy-driven centralized managers that oversee and coordinate all management activities.
o Enabling flexibility through peer-to-peer management and versatile, diverse management technologies and protocols.
o Reducing change complexity by isolating key functions within specific layers.
o Facilitating scalability by introducing hierarchical managers and collaborative processing.
The SLM process acts as a “bridge” between end-users and technical organizations; to which it:
o Integrates the disparate elements that make up service provisioning.
o Packages the elements into an easily used and understood service.
o Expresses the service in terms end-users can understand (e.g. business terminology).