About QoS Policies

Provides a brief overview of the QoS Policy solution.

For information about using policies in the context of the Community Manager developer portal, see Business Policies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

QoS (Quality of Service) policies are used to define metrics of requirements for ensuring service availability, performance, integrity, and reliability. QoS policies can be attached to Organization, Services, Operations, and Contracts via the Policies Attachment Portlet.

QoS policies fall into the following categories:

Service Level Policies

You can use Service Level Policies to define conditions for measuring and reporting performance of a specific contract.

The platform includes the following service level policies:

Quota Management Policies

You can use Quota Management Policies to protect your web services from intentional or unintentional overuse. The Quota Management Policy solution:

  • Allows API providers to specify maximum quotas for each contracted user of the service.
  • Allows you to specify quotas as number of transactions:
    • Per second
    • Per day
    • Per week
    • Per month
  • Enforces quotas for each contract, denying any transactions over and above the quota in the specified period. For example, if the quota is 50tps, once 50 transactions have been processed within the last second, any more transaction requests within the last second will be denied with an HTTP 403 for RESTful services, or an appropriate SOAP fault.
  • Allows you to specify performance optimization policies that define actions the system will take in the event of particular conditions. For example, you could define the policy to reduce all quotas for all consumers to "emergency" levels when a particular SLA threshold is reached.

The platform includes the following quota management policies: