Review
Cloud monitoring: A review, taxonomy, and open research issues

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2017.08.021Get rights and content

Abstract

Cloud monitoring supervise and manages the operational work-flow and processes within cloud data centers to ensure its performance capacity and capabilities. It assists smooth running of cloud services and minimizes the probability of SLA violation. Based on the requirements of cloud users and providers, it has various aspects, purposes, and utilization. For instance, a cloud provider exploits a monitoring tool to efficiently utilize underlying resources of a cloud. The unavailability of a comprehensive survey covering various aspects of cloud monitoring including purposes, communication models, performance overhead, scalability and architectural designs motivated to review this topic. This paper comprehensively reviews state-of-the-art cloud monitoring solutions for private and public clouds. It proposes a thematic taxonomy to classify the existing cloud monitoring solutions based on a set of parameters. It proposes a detailed analysis of existing solutions based on the proposed thematic taxonomy to highlight the commonalities and differences in existing solutions. Lastly, it puts forward a set of open research issues in this domain of research that hinders proposing optimal cloud monitoring solutions. This paper will help researchers of this domain to understand the problems clearly in this research area.

Introduction

Recently, cloud computing is reshaping the ways the technology is being used by the businesses. Cloud serve the technological needs of organizations by offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) (Buyya et al., 2009, Vaquero et al., 2008, Mell and Grance et al., ). It offers “Pay as you go” service model to charge cloud users (Ahmad et al., 2015). The organizations use the computational services offered by the cloud service providers to perform the computations (Ograph and Morgens, 2008). This provides the businesses a chance to focus more on their core capabilities rather-than worrying about or investing on computing infrastructure and softwares (Marston et al., 2011). Consequently, services offered by the cloud are gaining more successes in recent era (Buyya et al., 2008). The increased use of the cloud services has led to large-scale cloud deployments that rely on complex and distributed software and hardware systems (Zissis and Lekkas, 2012, Foster et al., 2008).

Cloud is a large and distributed system that considers virtualization technology to manage the resources (Armbrust et al., 2010, Sotomayor et al.,). It offers services to its users in the form of virtual machines. In this huge distributed and virtualized scenario, monitoring has become a necessity to fulfill user's requirement and to meet Service Level Agreement (SLA) (Mell and Grance et al.,, Alhamad et al., 2010, Kandukuri and Rakshit et al., 2009). Accurate, fine-grained, adaptive, and secure monitoring is necessary for planning management and efficient resource utilization (Zhang et al., 2010, Takabi et al., 2010). Also, it plays the key role for performance, capacity, and capability enhancement of the cloud. Also, monitoring assists improving the efficiency of the cloud in terms of its efficient resource utilization, resource assignment, performance enhancement, and billing for cloud resource usage (Buyya et al., 2010, Beloglazov and Buyya, 2010).

The aspect and perspectives of monitoring are different for cloud service provider (CSPs) and cloud-users (Wang et al., 2010). For instance, CSPs monitors cloud for efficient resource utilization and to ensure that SLA is not violated (Patel et al.,, Subashini and Kavitha, 2011, Liu et al., 2011). Alternatively, user perspective of cloud monitoring investigates whether the promised service level is met or not (Fatema et al., 2014).

In this paper, we extensively surveyed state-of-the-art cloud monitoring solutions. To the best of our knowledge, there are only a few studies that have surveyed cloud monitoring solutions. For instance, Fatema et al., 2014, Alhamazani et al., 2015, Aceto et al., 2013, Calero and Aguado, 2015, Ward and Barker, 2014, and Ismaeel et al. (2015), have surveyed different aspects of cloud monitoring but they lack in considering all aspects of cloud monitoring. In this survey, we have covered various aspects of cloud monitoring solutions such as monitoring perspective, purposes, monitoring cloud types, licensing, architecture, communication models, scalability, and overhead of cloud monitoring solutions. These are the important features, which define an attribute of monitoring solutions. Main contributions of this paper are as follows;

  • i)

    It surveys state-of-the-art monitoring solutions recently published to get detailed technical and socio-economical insight about them.

  • ii)

    It proposes a thematic taxonomy to classify existing literature into a set of categories.

  • iii)

    It analyzes existing solutions based on the proposed thematic taxonomy.

  • iv)

    Finally, it presents open research issues and challenges of cloud monitoring for researchers as a future guideline.

Rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a thematic taxonomy of cloud monitoring solutions. Section 3 overviews and provide analysis on the state-of-the-art cloud monitoring solutions. Section 4 elaborates state-of-the-art enterprise monitoring tools and also gives analysis on them. Section 5 presents a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art monitoring solutions. Section 6 reveals open research issues and challenges. Section 7 concludes the whole paper to present the findings.

Section snippets

Taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This section highlight and proposes a thematic taxonomy for the classification of existing cloud monitoring solutions. Fig. 1 classifies existing cloud monitoring solutions based on a set of parameters common in majority of the literature. The parameters selected for this thematic taxonomy include, (i) Monitoring perspective, (ii) Monitoring purpose, (iii) Types of clouds, (iv) Monitoring architecture, (v) Communication model, (vi) Monitoring Platform overhead, and (vii) License.

Review and comparative analysis of state-of-art cloud monitoring solutions

This section is consist of two major parts, first part presents a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art cloud monitoring solutions. In second part of this section a comparative analysis is provided on the state-of-the-art cloud monitoring solutions based on the thematic taxonomy presented in Section 2.

Enterprise monitoring tools

In addition to aforementioned scientific purpose tools, several enterprise monitoring tools are available. This section briefly overviews some most widely used enterprise monitoring tools, available in IT industry. It has been observed from users experiences and industry surveys that most of the companies are using more than one monitoring solution for their cloud infrastructure (Gildeh, 2014). Table 2 enlists some most widely used cloud monitoring tools.

Quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art cloud monitoring solutions

This section presents a critical analysis of state-of-the-art monitoring solutions presented in Section 3.1 on the basis quantitative data. In Table 4 a quantitative comparison of the state-of-the-art monitoring solutions for scalability is provided.

Scalability defines the capacity of a monitoring solution to adopt the changes in the physical and virtual infrastructure of the cloud system. To perform an analytical analysis of this feature, a quantitative comparison is provided in Table 4.

Open research issues and challenges

Cloud computing has achieved successes and growth during recent years. Monitoring of cloud is still facing several challenges. In this work, state-of-the-art cloud monitoring solutions have been surveyed to get the technical aspects of current solutions and also investigate the open research issues and challenges. Our study identified following open research issues and challenges that effects the performance of existing solutions. Fig. 3 highlights open research issues and challenges.

Conclusions and future work

In this paper the essence of cloud monitoring and state-of-the-art monitoring solutions have been surveyed to highlight their insights. It has debated on various aspects, purposes, and utilization of cloud monitoring solutions. It has proposed a comprehensive thematic taxonomy for cloud monitoring solutions. The proposed thematic taxonomy classifies literature based on main features of cloud monitoring solutions. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of monitoring solutions based on qualitative

Acknowledgement

This work is sponsored by the Malaysian Ministry of Education under the High Impact Research Grant of University of Malaya UM.C /625/1/HIR/MOE /FCSIT/03. The authors would like to thank Dr. Anjum Naveed and Dr. Ejaz Ahmed for their support and encouragement for this paper. We also would like to thank the reviewers who helped us to improve the presentation and quality of this paper.

Hassan Jamil Syed is a Ph.D. student at the University of Malaya. He received his Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Electrical Engineering from Quaid-e-Awam University of Engineering, Science, and Technology (QUEST), Nawabshah Pakistan in 2003. Hassan received his master's degree from the University of Bradford England in Personal Mobile and Satellite Communication (PMSC), in 2008. Hassan has worked in WorldCall Telecom Limited Karachi Pakistan as a network engineer for two years, after

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    Hassan Jamil Syed is a Ph.D. student at the University of Malaya. He received his Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Electrical Engineering from Quaid-e-Awam University of Engineering, Science, and Technology (QUEST), Nawabshah Pakistan in 2003. Hassan received his master's degree from the University of Bradford England in Personal Mobile and Satellite Communication (PMSC), in 2008. Hassan has worked in WorldCall Telecom Limited Karachi Pakistan as a network engineer for two years, after completing masters degree He has 4-year teaching experience; He was a full-time assistant professor at Faculty of Engineering Science and Technology (FEST), Iqra University Karachi Pakistan, and currently, he is on study leave. During teaching at Iqra University, he has supervised several final year projects and taught courses in Electronics, Telecommunication, and Computer Science Departments.

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