On Challenges of Cloud Monitoring

Abstract

Cloud services are becoming increasingly popular: 60% of information technology spending in 2016 was Cloud-based, and the size of the public Cloud service market will reach $236B by 2020. To ensure reliable operation of the Cloud services, one must monitor their health.While a number of research challenges in the area of Cloud monitoring have been solved, problems are remaining. This prompted us to highlight three areas, which cause problems to practitioners and require further research. These three areas are as follows: A) defining health states of Cloud systems, B) creating unified monitoring environments, and C) establishing high availability strategies.In this paper we provide details of these areas and suggest a number of potential solutions to the challenges. We also show that Cloud monitoring presents exciting opportunities for novel research and practice.

Heatmap Visualization for Monitoring Health of a Large-scale Cloud System

“…The on-demand computing service of the Cloud has enabled customers to access resources anywhere they want using any smart device via the Internet. The number of Cloud consumers is increasing daily; as a result, Cloud data centers continue to expand in terms of hardware and software infrastructure as well as traffic volume, thus making Cloud operation and management complex [20]. Besides, the Cloud platforms' growing scale, types, and complex infrastructure have also made efficient management challenging.…”

“…The volume of these logs in such large systems can quickly go massive [20]. The growing complexity, scale, speed, variety and volume of records and metrics generated by components of Cloud platforms makes the analysis of such data a Big Data challenge [2].…”

“…Cloud providers should constantly monitor the health of these components to ensure their services' reliability and performance and ensure Quality of Service (QoS). Any deviation from the promised QoS will negatively impact the reputation of the Cloud providers and may lead to a loss of revenue [20]. Therefore, Cloud monitoring plays the most significant role in managing and controlling software and hardware infrastructure, as well as providing information and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) [26].…”

“…Besides, every microservice generates its own logs. So the monitoring system has to be able to keep up with the massive amount of data generated by the logs [20].…”