Service workflow monitoring in private clouds: The user point of view

Cloud computing environments offer, in general, tools and mechanisms for the user to monitor computational, storage, and networking resources. However, only a few middlewares for cloud computing provide tools that help the user in the application monitoring. When we consider workflows and their dependencies, monitoring from the user point of view is not found in the literature of cloud middlewares. In this paper, we present an infrastructure for execution of service workflows in private clouds with tools that allow the user to keep track of his/her workflows, measuring each activity performed in the cloud resources. Through this monitoring, our workflow manager is able to react during the workflow execution, requesting new or better resources in order to the execution to comply with the application quality of service requirements. Besides that, the metrics that our monitoring system offers allow users to keep a detailed track of the organization internal costs involved in the processing, and then use this information to evaluate other alternatives, such as leasing resources from public cloud providers.