Service-to-SLA lifecycle model with blockchain management

Essential elements of the proper measurement of a service are its design, model (for this research is vital to how a service could be mapped into the used infrastructure components) and the way it is being monitored. From the IT infrastructure point of view, any of the following layers could be involved and used in service modeling delivered by IT – networking, physical servers and storage servers, operating systems layer, virtualization and containerization, databases, application layer, and services layer. Every service could be mapped to the underlying IT components to generate the service tree. Monitoring of those components generates events. In the service tree, the events could be propagated to the top level or used only to change the status of a specific group based on rules. Having all the status changes, performance information events, and metrics for the different components of a service, the client and the service provider can agree on storing it in a private blockchain. With a proper consensus algorithm, the blockchain is an appropriate means of tracking and confirming a given state of a particular component and guarantees transparency in measuring the parts and/or the complete service. The research proposes a model of interaction between services phases and Service Level Agreement (SLA) phases throughout their lifecycles. An idea for usage of blockchain technology in making the whole process of service-level management (SLM) transparent is proposed as well.