Architecture of a network performance monitor for application services on multi-clouds

Recently, many new services are being deployed on the cloud due to its flexibility of on-demand allocation and deallocation of computing resources. As the services require more advanced features such as fault-tolerance and high performance, much interest is focused on the multi-clouds. Hence, the needs for effectively managing the quality of services on multi-clouds emerge rapidly. Among the many factors affecting the quality of services, we focus on the network performance in this paper. We identify essential requirements of network performance monitor for multi-clouds and propose an architecture. In particular we address the necessity of supporting external agents and discuss how to integrate with them in a flexible and extensible way. In addition, the issues of timely delivery and off-line analysis of measured results are addressed.