On Observability and Monitoring of Distributed Systems: An Industry Interview Study

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

Application of Quality of Experience in Networked Services: Review, Trend & Perspectives

Full text embargoed until 17.10.2019 (publisher's embargo period, 12 months

CLAMS: cross-layer multi-cloud application monitoring as a service framework

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (e.g., multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (e.g., databases, application servers, data processing frameworks, etc.) platforms. Application services hosted on single/multiple cloud provider platforms have diverse characteristics that require extensive monitoring mechanisms to aid in controlling run-time quality of service (e.g., access latency and number of requests being served per second, etc.). To provide essential real-time information for effective and efficient cloud application quality of service (QoS) monitoring, in this paper we propose, develop and validate CLAMS-Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring-as-a-Service Framework. The proposed framework is capable of: (a) performing QoS monitoring of application components (e.g., database, web server, application server, etc.) that may be deployed across multiple cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon and Azure), and (b) giving visibility into the QoS of individual application component, which is something not supported by current monitoring services and techniques. We conduct experiments on real-world multi-cloud platforms such as Amazon and Azure to empirically evaluate our framework and the results validate that CLAMS efficiently monitors applications running across multiple clouds

Real-time QoS monitoring for cloud-based big data analytics applications in mobile environments

The service delivery model of cloud computing acts as a key enabler for big data analytics applications enhancing productivity, efficiency and reducing costs. The ever increasing flood of data generated from smart phones and sensors such as RFID readers, traffic cams etc require innovative provisioning and QoS monitoring approaches to continuously support big data analytics. To provide essential information for effective and efficient bid data analytics application QoS monitoring, in this paper we propose and develop CLAMS-Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring-as-a-Service Framework. The proposed framework: (a) performs multi-cloud monitoring, and (b) addresses the issue of cross-layer monitoring of applications. We implement and demonstrate CLAMS functions on real-world multi-cloud platforms such as Amazon and Azure

Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Real-Time Application QoS Monitoring and Benchmarking As-a-Service Framework

© 2013 IEEE. Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (e.g., multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (e.g., databases, application servers and data processing frameworks) platforms with features such as elasticity, pay-per-use, low upfront investment and low time to market. This has led to the proliferation of business critical applications that leverage various cloud platforms. Such applications hosted on single/multiple cloud provider platforms have diverse characteristics requiring extensive monitoring and benchmarking mechanisms to ensure run-time Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., latency and throughput). This paper proposes, develops and validates CLAMBS - Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring and Benchmarking as-a-Service for efficient QoS monitoring and benchmarking of cloud applications hosted on multi-clouds environments. The major highlight of CLAMBS is its capability of monitoring and benchmarking individual application components such as databases and web servers, distributed across cloud layers (∗-aaS), spread among multiple cloud providers. We validate CLAMBS using prototype implementation and extensive experimentation and show that CLAMBS efficiently monitors and benchmarks application components on multi-cloud platforms including Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure

An overview of the commercial cloud monitoring tools: Research dimensions, design issues, and state-of-the-art

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 Press) Cross-layer multi-cloud real-time application QoS monitoring and benchmarking as-a-service framework

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (databases, application servers and data processing frameworks) platforms with features such as elasticity, pay-per-use, low upfront investment and low time to market. This has led to the proliferation of business critical applications that leverage various cloud platforms. Such applications hosted on single or multiple cloud provider platforms have diverse characteristics requiring extensive monitoring and benchmarking mechanisms to ensure run-time Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., latency and throughput). This paper proposes, develops and validates CLAMBS:Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring and Benchmarking as-a-Service for efficient QoS monitoring and benchmarking of cloud applications hosted on multi-clouds environments. The major highlight of CLAMBS is its capability of monitoring and benchmarking individual application components such as databases and web servers, distributed across cloud layers, spread among multiple cloud providers. We validate CLAMBS using prototype implementation and extensive experimentation and show that CLAMBS efficiently monitors and benchmarks application components on multi-cloud platforms including Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure