Business success of companies heavily depends on the availability and performance of their client applications. Due to modern development paradigms such as DevOps and microservice architectural styles, applications are decoupled into services with complex interactions and dependencies. Although these paradigms enable individual development cycles with reduced delivery times, they cause several challenges to manage the services in distributed systems. One major challenge is to observe and monitor such distributed systems. This paper provides a qualitative study to understand the challenges and good practices in the field of observability and monitoring of distributed systems. In 28 semi-structured interviews with software professionals we discovered increasing complexity and dynamics in that field. Especially observability becomes an essential prerequisite to ensure stable services and further development of client applications. However, the participants mentioned a discrepancy in the awareness regarding the importance of the topic, both from the management as well as from the developer perspective. Besides technical challenges, we identified a strong need for an organizational concept including strategy, roles and responsibilities. Our results support practitioners in developing and implementing systematic observability and monitoring for distributed systems.
@cite_3 give an insight into commercial cloud monitoring tools, showing state-of-the-art features, identifying shortcomings and, connected with that, future areas of research. Information aggregation across different layers of abstraction, a broad range of measurable metrics and extensibility are seen as critical success factors. Tools were found to be lacking in standardization regarding monitoring processes and metrics.
@cite_3
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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. In this paper, we address the cloud service trustworthiness evaluation problem, which in essence is a multi-attribute decision-making problem, by proposing a novel evaluation model based on the fuzzy gap measurement and the evidential reasoning approach. There are many sources of uncertainties in the process of cloud service trustworthiness evaluation. In addition to the intrinsic uncertainties, cloud service providers face the problem of discrepant evaluation information given by different users from different perspectives. To address these problems, we develop a novel fuzzy gap evaluation approach to assess cloud service trustworthiness and to provide evaluation values from different perspectives. From the evaluation values, the perception-importance, delivery-importance, and perception-delivery gaps are generated. These three gaps reflect the discrepancy evaluation of cloud service trustworthiness in terms of perception utility, delivery utility, and importance utility, respectively. Finally, the gap measurement of each perspective is represented by a belief structure and aggregated using the evidential reasoning approach to generate final evaluation results for informative and robust decision making. From this hybrid two-stage evaluation process, cloud service providers can get improvement suggestions from intermediate information derived from the gap measurement, which is the main advantage of this evaluation process. Nowadays, Cloud Computing is widely used to deliver services over the Internet for both technical and economical reasons. The number of Cloud-based services has increased rapidly and strongly in the last years, and so is increased the complexity of the infrastructures behind these services. To properly operate and manage such complex infrastructures effective and efficient monitoring is constantly needed. Many works in literature have surveyed Cloud properties, features, underlying technologies (e.g. virtualization), security and privacy. However, to the best of our knowledge, these surveys lack a detailed analysis of monitoring for the Cloud. To fill this gap, in this paper we provide a survey on Cloud monitoring. We start analyzing motivations for Cloud monitoring, providing also definitions and background for the following contributions. Then, we carefully analyze and discuss the properties of a monitoring system for the Cloud, the issues arising from such properties and how such issues have been tackled in literature. We also describe current platforms, both commercial and open source, and services for Cloud monitoring, underlining how they relate with the properties and issues identified before. Finally, we identify open issues, main challenges and future directions in the field of Cloud monitoring. Although cloud computing has become an important topic over the last couple of years, the development of cloud-specific monitoring systems has been neglected. This is surprising considering their importance for metering services and, thus, being able to charge customers. In this paper we introduce a monitoring architecture that was developed and is currently implemented in the EASI-CLOUDS project. The demands on cloud monitoring systems are manifold. Regular checks of the SLAs and the precise billing of the resource usage, for instance, require the collection and converting of infrastructure readings in short intervals. To ensure the scalability of the whole cloud, the monitoring system must scale well without wasting resources. In our approach, the monitoring data is therefore organized in a distributed and easily scalable tree structure and it is based on the Device Management Specification of the OMA and the DMT Admin Specification of the OSGi. Its core component includes the interface, the root of the tree and extension points for sub trees which are implemented and locally managed by the data suppliers themselves. In spite of the variety and the distribution of the data, their access is generic and location-transparent. Besides simple suppliers of monitoring data, we outline a component that provides the means for storing and preprocessing data. The motivation for this component is that the monitoring system can be adjusted to its subscribers - while it usually is the other way round. In EASI-CLOUDS, the so-called Context Stores aggregate and prepare data for billing and other cloud components.