Using service models for management of Internet services

As Internet services grow in complexity, Internet Service Providers (ISP's) are finding out that the ad hoc methods that they have employed thus far t o monitor and diagnose their services are not sufficient to provide accepta ble service quality to their subscribers. In this paper, we demonstrate how service models can be used by ISP's to effectively manage their service of ferings. A service model encapsulates a human expert's knowledge of a servi ce, its components, and its interdependencies with other services. In addit ion, using ongoing measurements, a service model tracks the health of the d ifferent services and their components. By traversing a service model top-d own, an operator can not only assess the overall health of a service, but a lso easily correlate the health of all the services and service components to determine the root cause of any problems that may occur. By minimizing t he time and effort needed to diagnose problems, service models enable ISP o perators to efficiently resolve problems that occur in an ISP environment. Since each ISP system is unique in many respects, unique sen-ice models hav e to be crafted for each of the services in every ISP system. Handcrafting customized service models requires enormous effort and time on the part of a human expert, a luxury that few TSP's can afford. In this paper, we descr ibe a methodology for constructing customized service models for a target I SP system with minimal human intervention This methodology relies on a serv ice model creation engine that composes a custom service model for an ISP s ystem using a predefined service model template specification and automatic ally discovered information about the target ISP system. me describe a prot otype implementation of this methodology and present an example of a servic e model obtained from a real-world ISP system. Although described in the co ntext of ISP systems, the concepts described in this paper are applicable f or the management of networks and services in enterprise systems as web.