In software development, specific SLAs may apply to application outsourcing contracts in accordance with software quality standards, as well as recommendations from neutral organizations such as CISQ, which have published numerous articles on the subject (e.B. Using Software Measurement in SLAs[17]), which are publicly available. The types of SLA metrics required depend on the services you provide. Many elements can be monitored as part of an SLA, but the scheme should be as simple as possible to avoid confusion and excessive costs on both sides. When choosing metrics, review your operations and decide what is most important. The more complex the monitoring system (and the repair system associated with it), the less likely it is to be effective because no one has the time to properly analyze the data. When in doubt, opt for a simple collection of metric data. Automated systems are best because expensive manual collection of measurements is unlikely to be reliable. A Service Level Commitment (SLC) is a broader and more general form of an SLA. The two are different because an SLA is bidirectional and involves two teams. In contrast, an SLC is a one-sided commitment that defines what a team can guarantee to its customers at all times. As managed services and cloud services become more common, SLAs are evolving to meet new approaches. Shared services, not custom resources, characterize new contractual methods, so service-level commitments are often used to create comprehensive agreements designed to cover all of a service provider`s customers.

For the defined measures to be useful, an appropriate baseline must be established, with measures defined at an appropriate and achievable level of performance. This baseline will likely be redefined throughout the participation of the parties to the agreement using the processes set out in the “Periodic Review and Amendment” section of the SLA. The main thing is to build a new layer on the network, cloud or SOA middleware capable of creating a negotiation mechanism between service providers and consumers. One example is the EU-funded Framework 7 SLA@SOI[12] research project, which examines aspects of multi-level and multi-vendor SLAs within service-oriented infrastructure and cloud computing, while another EU-funded project, VISION Cloud,[13] has yielded results in terms of content-driven SLAs. .