3-D cloud monitoring: Enabling effective cloud infrastructure and application management

A cloud environment is a complex environment composed of many different entities and layers. Each of these cloud entities may be furnished with mechanisms offering various management actions. For any given situation, different management actions may be applicable and often simultaneously. Enforcing isolated management actions or combining contradictory management actions may negatively affect cloud application quality and cloud infrastructure performance. This means that correctly selecting and effectively combining these management actions for a given situation becomes an important challenge in cloud computing. In this paper, we address the problem of identifying situations where more than one management action can be performed. The key contributions of our paper are: (1) a three dimensional (3-D) monitoring model for analyzing cloud monitoring information; (2) the concept and formalization of Context of Interest (CoI) that specifies how to retrieve meaningful information from the 3-D model to support the coordination of management actions between cloud infrastructure and application. We conducted experiments in a real testbed using Openstack and the WordPress Web site application. Our results show that analyzing cloud monitoring information using the 3-D model and the CoI can support a more effective identification of management actions to be taken.