  Critical networked services enable significant revenue for network operators
and, in turn, are regulated by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In order to
ensure SLAs are being met, service levels need to be monitored. One technique
for this involves active measurement mechanisms which employ measurement probes
along the network to inject synthetic traffic and compute the network
performance. However, these mechanisms are expensive in terms of resources
consumption. Thus, these mechanisms usually can cover only a fraction of what
could be measured, which can lead to SLA violations being missed. Besides that,
the definition of this fraction is a practice done by human administrators,
which does not scale well and does not adapt to highly dynamic networking
patterns. In this article, we examine the potential benefits of using P2P
technology to improve the detection of SLA Violations. We first describe the
principles of a P2P-based steering of active measurement mechanisms. These
principles are characterized by a high degree of decentralized decision making
across a network using a self-organizing overlay. In a second step, we present
measurement session activation strategies based on these principles. These
strategies do not require human intervention, are adaptive to changes in
network conditions, and independent of the underlying active measurement
technology.
