every other Service Provider that offered the service also. The framework 

presented here allows a single proxy to monitor multiple services provided by 

multiple ASPs 

Comparing the performance of different Service Providers with a common 

methodology is possible with this framework. This would be useful to determine 

which Service Provider performs better from the customer perspective. 

The benefits of the framework developed have now been highlighted. It is apparent that it 

offers greater levels of flexibility that server side monitoring by the Service Provider or 

other methods of client side monitoring for SLA Verification.  

The use of the framework during the case study raised one significant issue.  

The method of how mappings are defined in SLAs is not flexible enough. For the 

prototype implementation, the comparison that the 

RequestChecker

 class does of 

request URLs against mappings was simply a start of string comparison of the 

request against all the service mappings for the Customers. This may present 

problems as some Service Providers pass parameters via the POST method that 

indicate to the target service what service function is being accessed. Since these 

parameters do not appear in the query section of the URL, a string comparison 

cannot be done to determine the service function the user is accessing. 

Overall the framework offers a flexible architecture for monitoring Web delivered services 

from the user perspective. 

6.5 CONCLUSION 

6.5.1 Achievements 

A final review of the objectives of the dissertation and what was actually achieved will now 

be examined. The primary objective of this dissertation was to develop a framework that 

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