Application-level performance monitoring of cloud services based on the complex event processing paradigm

Monitoring of applications deployed to Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds is still an open problem. In this paper, we discuss an approach based on the complex event processing paradigm, which allows application developers to specify and monitor high-level application performance metrics. We use the case of a Web 2.0 sentiment analysis application to illustrate the limitations we currently experience with regard to cloud monitoring, and show how our approach allows for more expressive definitions of monitored metrics. Furthermore, we indicate how the higher-level metrics produced by our approach can be used to increase application elasticity in an existing cloud middleware.