Creating and Maintaining Service Provider and Application Accounts
An essential part of managing WebLogic Network Gatekeeper is dealing with service provider partners. Network Gatekeeper provides a partner administration model to help operators handle the needs and demands of their partners in a flexible and powerful way:
Each application that uses the application-facing interfaces in Network Gatekeeper must establish an account. The account is uniquely identified by an application instance.
An application instance belongs to an application account and a service provider account.
An application account belongs to a service provider account and an application group.
A service provider account belongs to a service provider group. A service provider account can have zero or more application accounts associated with it.
An application group is associated with a service level agreement on the application-level.
A service provider group is associated with a service level agreement on the service provider-level and may also be associated with a service provider node SLA.
A global node SLA is not associated with any special group or account, but is valid for all accounts and groups.
See Figure 2-1 for an illustration of the relationship among the different account types.
Figure 2-1 Service provider and application model with SLAs
The separation of accounts and groups provides a flexible way of defining service level agreements. Groups allow the Network Gatekeeper administrator to offer tiers of service at both the service provider (via service provider group SLAs) and application (via application group SLAs) level.
For example, a Network Gatekeeper administrator might use SLAs to create three different categories of service providers:
Bronze
Silver
Gold
Each of these would have different privileges when it comes to maximum throughput and QoS parameters. When a new service provider is provisioned, the service provider is associated with an appropriate group based on, for example, the amount of network traffic the service provider is projected to generate. If the outcome is not what was predicted, the service provider account can be reassigned to another service provider group with a different QoS parameter defined in the service provider level SLA.
Note:
IDs of service provider groups, application groups, application instances, service provider accounts must be unique. The combination of service provider account and application account for an application instance must be unique.
The service provider and application account and group registrations are performed either through the WebLogic Network Gatekeeper Administration Console or through external management systems integrated with WebLogic Network Gatekeeper using the Network Gatekeeper Partner Relationship Management Interfaces or via MBeans. This guide describes many of the tasks associated with establishing and maintaining these accounts and groups using the Administration Console.
Note:
Service provider accounts, application accounts, and application instances have states that can be changed using OAM, so they can be temporarily be taken out of service. See States of Accounts.
Depending on which communication service is being used, provision communication service specific data using the operation and management for relevant communication service.
Distribute the credentials to be used by the application to the service provider.
Note:
It is also possible to create unique SLAs and groups for an individual application. Accounts can be associated with other groups in runtime, so the class of service can be adjusted over time.
