A Review of Monitoring Probes for Cloud Computing Continuum

Abstract

Nowadays, we consider optimizing data-intensive applications imperative for the digital enterprise to exploit the vast amounts of available data and maximize its business value. This fact necessitated the broad adoption of multicloud and fog deployment models towards enhanced use of distributed hosting resources that may reach the edge of the network. However, this poses significant research challenges concerning how one can automatically discover the best initial deployment of such an application and then continuously adapt it according to the defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs), even in extreme scenarios of workload fluctuations. Among the key tools for managing such multicloud applications are advanced distributed monitoring mechanisms. In this work, we consider some of their fundamental components, which refer to the means for efficiently measuring and propagating information on the application components and their hosting. Specifically, we analyze the 20 most well-known monitoring tools and compare them against several criteria. This comparison allows us to discuss their fit for the distributed complex event processing frameworks of the future that can efficiently monitor applications and trigger reconfigurations across the Cloud Computing Continuum.