Role-Based Templates for Cloud Monitoring

Abstract

Cloud computing has evolved in the recent years to a well established computing paradigm. With this evolution, the complexity and requirements for monitoring cloud-based services have also increased. Without a doubt, monitoring for cloud computing is a crucial task which has been addressed in a number of research works. However, monitoring for cloud computing is often designed to be carried out by cloud providers. Monitoring by cloud providers on the one hand offers the flexibility and full control required for monitoring; on the other hand, the trustworthiness of the cloud provider is often questioned. In this work, we present a generic approach that can harmonize both of the aforementioned issues. Our solution abstracts from the complexity by using role-based templates for monitoring in combination with autonomous agents; thus, this approach can be used by both, cloud consumers and cloud providers. With a proof of concept prototype, we show that our approach can be adapted for large scale cloud monitoring scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility that our monitoring solution can be extended to be applicable for different domains.

Scalable Blockchain-assisted Log Storage System for Cloud-generated Logs

“…In spite of above-indicated monitoring challenges, Cloud monitoring tools are mainly implemented by the CSPs which makes the trustworthiness of the monitoring data questionable [84]. Amazon CloudWatch [3], Google Stackdriver Monitoring [35] are examples of such monitoring systems.…”

“…In fact, full access to all resources (e.g., bare-metal servers, networking components, cloud management platforms, virtualisation tools, etc.) is required to deploy holistic monitoring solutions [84], and such access is only available to the CSP. While the full control over monitoring systems and generated logs allow a CSP to monitor and maintain Cloud services efficiently, it gives them a controversial power over evidential resources that are significantly important to CSCs.…”

On Challenges of Cloud Monitoring

“…Implementation of a complete monitoring system requires full access to the components that will be monitored [30]. Nguyen et al [30] indicated that only Cloud providers have such level of access to Cloud resources. Therefore, most of the Cloud monitoring solutions are built by Cloud providers.…”

“…In contrast, Cloud consumers require full details of monitoring data and need a way to verify the monitoring details that are provided by the Cloud provider. To address this issue, Nguyen et al [30] combined role-based monitoring templates with agent-based monitoring and used event processing engine to refine the collected data and to provide a trustworthy and holistic monitoring solution.…”

“…Although, Cloud consumers generally trust Cloud providers, nevertheless, on many occasions a Cloud consumer needs to validate monitoring and billing details given by the Cloud provider. To be objective, this validation requires an independent tool so users can truly verify the accuracy of the data shared by the Cloud provider [30]. Therefore, having an independent solution, which can be used by Cloud providers and consumers at the same time, is crucial.…”