CloudHealth: A Model-Driven Approach to Watch the Health of Cloud Services
This addresses the problem of health monitoring in complex cloud environments for operators, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing monitoring solutions without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the challenge of monitoring cloud system health by relating KPIs and reporting health information to operators, presenting CloudHealth, a model-based approach that operationalizes monitoring goals into subgoals, metrics, and probes for dynamic data collection and visualization.
Cloud systems are complex and large systems where services provided by different operators must coexist and eventually cooperate. In such a complex environment, controlling the health of both the whole environment and the individual services is extremely important to timely and effectively react to misbehaviours, unexpected events, and failures. Although there are solutions to monitor cloud systems at different granularity levels, how to relate the many KPIs that can be collected about the health of the system and how health information can be properly reported to operators are open questions. This paper reports the early results we achieved in the challenge of monitoring the health of cloud systems. In particular we present CloudHealth, a model-based health monitoring approach that can be used by operators to watch specific quality attributes. The CloudHealth Monitoring Model describes how to operationalize high level monitoring goals by dividing them into subgoals, deriving metrics for the subgoals, and using probes to collect the metrics. We use the CloudHealth Monitoring Model to control the probes that must be deployed on the target system, the KPIs that are dynamically collected, and the visualization of the data in dashboards.