3  REQUIREMENTS  

3.1 Introduction 

This Chapter first revisited the motivations of this dissertation and the primary objectives 

defined in Chapter 1. It describes the use of HTTP as a service delivery mechanism. The 

potential sources of performance and availability issues that HTTP is prone to are 

highlighted. Next the monitoring requirements of HTTP delivered services are analysed 

including what parameters should be monitored. Finally the issue of how to monitor services 

so as to be able to capture the availability and performance as perceived by the end user is 

addressed. 

3.2 Motivations Revisited 

Before going further, it is worth revisiting the motivations of this research. 

3.2.1 Motivations 

The primary motivations are: 

The emergence of Application Service Providers and the use of the Web as a delivery 

mechanism for services. One of the key issues is can services that are delivered over 

the Web perform comparably with traditionally hosted applications 

Quality of Service mechanisms for network, application and other components used 

to deliver services can help to guarantee the overall performance of a service. 

However, there

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. Therefore appropriate QoS needs to be implemented on all 

components. Another issue is that the Service Provider does not always manage the