Monitoring web services� quality of service: a literature review

Monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) compliance is an important procedure in web service environment. It determines whether users� expectations are met, and becomes the vital factor for them to decide whether to continue paying for the service or not. The monitoring is performed by checking the actual services performance against the QoS stated in Service Level Agreement (SLA). In relation to that, the need for monitoring vague QoS specifications in SLA has become more apparent nowadays. This paper reviews the published literature on web services QoS monitoring. A total of 60 selected articles were systematically analyzed. There were 23 of the articles selected through restrictive search criteria while the other 37 were selected based on unrestrictive search criteria. The review shows that little evidence exists on monitoring vague QoS specifications of web services. Providing ability for monitoring QoS that is specified vaguely in SLA could give new insights and implications to web services field. This paper concludes with some recommended future works to construct the theory and perform the empirical research. © 2012, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.