An overview of the commercial cloud monitoring tools: research dimensions, design issues, and state-of-the-art

Abstract

Cloud monitoring activity involves dynamically tracking the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to virtualized resources (e.g., VM, storage, network, appliances, etc.), the physical resources they share, the applications running on them and data hosted on them. Applications and resources configuration in cloud computing environment is quite challenging considering a large number of heterogeneous cloud resources. Further, considering the fact that at each point of time, there will be a different and specific cloud service which may be massively required. Hence, cloud monitoring tools can assist a cloud providers or application developers in: (i) keeping their resources and applications operating at peak efficiency; (ii) detecting variations in resource and application performance; (iii) accounting the Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations of certain QoS parameters; and (iv) tracking the leave and join operations of cloud resources due to failures and other dynamic configuration changes.In this paper, we identify and discuss the major research dimensions and design issues related to engineering cloud monitoring tools. We further discuss how aforementioned research dimensions and design issues are handled by current academic research as well as by commercial monitoring tools.

A Network Edge Monitoring Approach for Real-Time Data Streaming Applications

“…Considering Figure 3, when our monitoring solution executes, it proceeds as follows: (1) A real-time application server (e.g. MCU server implemented by Medooze 11 as an open source conference application in our experiment) typically serves a large number of users and can be deployed and run on a selected edge computing node. (2) All relevant QoS metrics are measured at regular intervals by a monitoring probe and then all measured values will be reported to the monitoring server.…”

“… Non-intrusiveness: A non-intrusive monitoring system is capable of being lightweight to the normal flows of application and infrastructure [10].  Interoperability: An interoperable monitoring system is not specific to a given infrastructure and is able to monitor an application that resides on other cloud providers' infrastructure [11].  Live-migration support: In live-migration, applications migrate from a physical host to another one at any time without stopping operations [12].…”

Security SLA Based Monitoring in Clouds

“…Monitoring processes in Clouds serve to collect, process and report information on metrics such as performance or other custom metrics against well defined behavior rules or policies [2], [4], [5]. The main feature of monitoring systems consists in running a mechanism for the detection of the state of the system and performing automatic actions or generating reports for resolutions in a transparent manner on any infrastructure.…”

“…For instance, monitoring SLAs for simple metrics like workload, performance or availability, offers both to the providers and the consumers the needed information to implement mechanisms to prevent or recover from eventual agreement violations [1], [2].…”

“…As far as we know, almost all existing work in the state of the art does not offer a holistic method to describe security SLAs and to manage them during runtime [2], [4], [5].…”