JCatascopia: Monitoring Elastically Adaptive Applications in the Cloud

Over the past decade, Cloud Computing has rapidly become a widely accepted paradigm with core concepts such as elasticity, scalability and on demand automatic resource provisioning emerging as next generation Cloud service-must have-properties. Automatic resource provisioning for Cloud applications is not a trivial task, requiring for both the applications and platform, to be constantly monitored, capturing information at various levels and time granularity. In this paper we describe the challenges that occur when monitoring elastically adaptive Cloud applications and to address these issues we present JCatascopia, a fully automated, multi-layer, interoperable Cloud Monitoring System. Experiments on different production Cloud platforms show that JCatascopia is a Monitoring System capable of supporting a fully automated Cloud resource provisioning system with proven interoperability, scalability and low runtime footprint. Most importantly, JCatascopia is able to adapt in a fully automatic manner when elasticity actions are enforced to an application deployment.