On Challenges of Cloud Monitoring
This work highlights unresolved problems in cloud monitoring that impact practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research without introducing new methods or data.
The paper identifies three remaining challenges in cloud monitoring—defining health states, creating unified monitoring environments, and establishing high availability strategies—and suggests potential solutions to address these issues for practitioners.
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.