Towards Independent Run-Time Cloud Monitoring

Cloud computing services are integral to the digital transformation. They deliver greater connectivity, tremendous savings, and lower total cost of ownership. Despite such benefits and benchmarking advances, costs are still quite unpredictable, performance is unclear, security is inconsistent, and there is minimal control over aspects like data and service locality. Estimating performance of cloud environments is very hard for cloud consumers. They would like to make informed decisions about which provider better suits their needs using specialized evaluation mechanisms. Providers have their own tools reporting specific metrics, but they are potentially biased and often incomparable across providers. Current benchmarking tools allow comparison but consumers need more flexibility to evaluate environments under actual operating conditions for specialized applications. Ours is early stage work and a step towards a monitoring solution that enables independent evaluation of clouds for very specific application needs. In this paper, we present our initial architecture of the Cloud Monitor that aims to integrate existing and new benchmarks in a flexible and extensible way. By way of a simplistic demonstrator, we illustrate the concept. We report some preliminary monitoring results after a brief time of monitoring and are able to observe unexpected anomalies. The results suggest an independent monitoring solution is a powerful enabler of next generation cloud computing, not only for the consumer but potentially the whole ecosystem.