Practical Aspects for Effective Monitoring of SLAs in Cloud Computing and Virtual Platforms

Cloud computing is transforming the software landscape. Software services are increasingly designed in modular and decoupled fashion that communicate over a network and are deployed on the Cloud. Cloud offers three service models namely Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS). Although this allows better management of resources, the Quality of Service (QoS) in dynamically changing environments like Cloud must be legally stipulated as a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This introduces several challenges in the area of SLA enforcement. A key problem is detecting the root cause of performance problems which may lie in hosted service or deployment platforms (PaaS or IaaS), and adjusting resources accordingly. Monitoring and Analytic methods have emerged as promising and inevitable solutions in this context, but require precise real time monitoring data. Towards this goal, we assess practical aspects for effective monitoring of SLA-aware services hosted in Cloud. We present two real-world application scenarios for deriving requirements and present the prototype of our Monitoring and Analytics framework. We claim that this work provides necessary foundations for researching SLA-aware root cause analysis algorithms under realistic setup.