Management of Cloud Infrastructures through Agents

In the Cloud context, the monitoring of service levels becomes critical because of the conflicts of interest that might occur between provider and customer in case of outage. Here we focus on Cloud monitoring at infrastructure level (IaaS), but with the perspective of a Cloud customer. Cloud customers cannot check the compliance of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) trusting the monitoring service of their own Cloud provider. In fact the Cloud provider has a conflicting interest ensuring the guarantees on service levels it provides. Besides Cloud customers need to detect under-utilization and overload conditions to take decisions about load balancing and resource reconfiguration. In this paper we present an agency that is deployed in the Cloud together with the customer´s applications and can be used to configure a monitoring infrastructure. Mobile software agents take measures inside the Cloud resources, which are completely under the customer´s administration, collect performance information and compute metrics according to the user´s requirements. They implement a provider independent monitoring of the Cloud infrastructure during the execution of applications.