Beyond Nagios - Design of a cloud monitoring system

The paper describes a monitoring system specially designed for cloud infrastructures. The features that are relevant for such distributed application are -) scalability, that allows utilization in systems of thousands of nodes, -) flexibility, to be customized for a large number of applications, -) openness, to allow the coexistence of user and administration monitoring. We take as a starting point the Nagios monitoring system, that has been successfully used for Grid monitoring and is still used for clouds. We analyze its shortcomings when applied to cloud monitoring, and propose a new monitoring system, that we call Rocmon, that sums up Nagios experience with a cloud perspective. Like Nagios, Rocmon is plugin-oriented to be flexible. To be fully inter-operable and long-living, it uses standard tools: the OGF OCCI for the configuration interface, the REST paradigm to take advantage of Web tools, and HTML5 WebSockets for data transfers. The design is checked with an open source Ruby implementation featuring the most relevant aspects

Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A Certification Framework for Cloud Security Properties: The Monitoring Path

In this paper we describe the structure and functionality of a certification integrated framework aimed to support the certification of security properties of a Cloud infrastructure (IaaS), a platform (PaaS), or the software layer (SaaS). Such framework will bring service users, service providers and cloud suppliers to work together with certification authorities in order to ensure security properties and certificates validity in the continuously evolving cloud environment. For this purpose, the framework relies on multiple types of evidence gathering with respect to security, e.g., testing services, monitoring agents or trusted computing proofs. In this paper we will focus only on the monitoring case and will illustrate its use. Yet, this framework is designed to be able to follow models for hybrid, incremental and multi-layer security certification since cloud security has to build upon the entire cloud stack

Designing Monitoring Systems for Continuous Certification of Cloud Services: Deriving Meta-requirements and Design Guidelines

Continuous service certification (CSC) involves the consistently gathering and assessing certification-relevant information about cloud service operations to validate whether they continue to adhere to certification criteria. Previous research has proposed test-based CSC methodologies that directly assess the components of cloud service infrastructures. However, test-based certification requires that certification authorities can access the cloud infrastructure, which various issues may limit. To address these challenges, cloud service providers need to conduct monitoring-based CSC; that is, monitor their cloud service infrastructure to gather certification-relevant data by themselves and then provide these data to certification authorities. Nevertheless, we need to better understand how to design monitoring systems to enable cloud service providers to perform such monitoring. By taking a design science perspective, we derive universal meta-requirements and design guidelines for CSC monitoring systems based on findings from five expert focus group interviews with 33 cloud experts and 10 one-to-one interviews with cloud customers. With this study, we expand the current knowledge base regarding CSC and monitoring-based CSC. Our derived design guidelines contribute to the development of CSC monitoring systems and enable monitoring-based CSC that overcomes issues of prior test-based approaches

A Semantic Wiki-based Platform for IT Service Management

The book researches the use of a semantic wiki in the area of IT Service Management within the IT department of an SME. An emphasis of the book lies in the design and prototypical implementation of tools for the integration of ITSM-relevant information into the semantic wiki, as well as tools for interactions between the wiki and external programs. The result of the book is a platform for agile, semantic wiki-based ITSM for IT administration teams of SMEs

DevOps: Concepts, Practices, Tools, Benefits and Challenges

DevOps, originated in the context of agile software development, seems an appropriate approach to enable the continuous delivery and deployment of working software in small releases. Organizations are taking significant interest in adopting DevOps ways of working. The interest is there, however the challenge is how to effectively adopt DevOps in practice? Before disembarking on the journey of DevOps, there is a need to clearly understand the DevOps concepts, practice, tools, benefits and underlying challenges. Thus, in order to address the research question in hand, this paper adopts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach to identify, review and synthesize the relevant studies published in public domain between: 2010-2016. SLR approach was applied to initially identify a set of 450 papers. Finally, 30 of 450 relevant papers were selected and reviewed to identify the eight key DevOps concepts, twenty practices, and a twelve categories tools. The research also identified seventeen benefits of using DevOps approach for application development and encountered four known challenges. The results of this review will serve as a knowledge base for researchers and practitioners, which can be used to effectively understand and establish the integrated DevOps capability in the local context

DECIDE: DevOps for Trusted, Portable and Interoperable Multi-Cloud Applications towards the Digital Single Market

The main objective of the DECIDE action is to provide a new generation of multi-cloud service-based software framework, enabling techniques and mechanisms to design, develop, and dynamically deploy multi-cloud aware applications in an ecosystem of reliable, interoperable, and legal compliant cloud services. Three use cases will be conducted to validate the proposed approach.The project leading to this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731533