Towards cloud-based unobtrusive monitoring in remote multi-vendor environments

Abstract

Nowadays, many complex multi-vendor production environments, such as telecom infrastructures in smart cities or on-board passenger information systems in trains, are based on micro-services and deployed in the cloud. From a service integrator viewpoint, building new solutions for these environments, which can host a large number of externally designed and developed micro-services, is often complex and error-prone. This is in part due to undocumented behaviour or undocumented architectural specifications of such systems. Advanced service monitoring can offer a solution to quickly detect anomalies or unexpected service interaction behaviour during on-site integration. However, the monitoring service should not have an impact on the production environment itself. Therefore, this article proposes an agent-based unobtrusive monitoring platform, capable of monitoring both internally developed and externally developed services through the use of sidecar containers. It monitors state, metrics and network traffic at micro-service level and the research was conducted as part of the DynAMo research project, a collaboration with various industry partners. Prototype evaluation proves that our solution has a negligible impact (below 0.02% CPU usage on average) on an existing micro-service environment just as other monitoring systems like Prometheus while offering additional functionality focused on multi-vendor service integration. This makes it suitable to be deployed in complex production domains to further aid on-site integration and quickly find potential new anomalies.