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

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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 given point of time, there may be need to change cloud resource configuration (number of VMs, types of VMs, number of appliance instances, etc.) for meet application QoS requirements under uncertainties (resource failure, resource overload, workload spike, etc.). 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 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 the aforementioned research dimensions and design issues are handled by current academic research as well as by commercial monitoring tools.

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Notes

  1. http://www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/.

  2. http://bitnami.org/faq/cloud_amazon_ec2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Khalid Alhamazani & Fethi Rabhi

  2. CSIRO, Canberra, Australia

    Rajiv Ranjan & Prem Prakash Jayaraman

  3. Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden

    Karan Mitra

  4. North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA

    Samee Ullah Khan

  5. NICTA, Sydney, Australia

    Adnene Guabtni

  6. University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Vasudha Bhatnagar

Authors
  1. Khalid Alhamazani
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  2. Rajiv Ranjan
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  3. Karan Mitra
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  4. Fethi Rabhi
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  5. Prem Prakash Jayaraman
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  6. Samee Ullah Khan
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  8. Vasudha Bhatnagar
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Correspondence to Rajiv Ranjan.

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Alhamazani, K., Ranjan, R., Mitra, K. et al. An overview of the commercial cloud monitoring tools: research dimensions, design issues, and state-of-the-art. Computing 97, 357–377 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-014-0398-5

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