Application-Level Monitoring and SLA Violation Detection for Multi-Tenant Cloud Services

Abstract

Keeping the quality of service defined by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is a key factor to facilitate business operations of Cloud providers. SLA enforcement relies on resource and application monitoring—a topic that has been investigated by various Cloud-related projects. Application-level monitoring still represents an open research issue, especially for billing and accounting purposes. Such a monitoring is becoming fundamental, as Cloud services are multi-tenant, thus having users sharing the same resources. This chapter describes key challenges on application provisioning and SLA enforcement in Clouds, introduces a Cloud Application and SLA monitoring architecture, and proposes two methods for determining the frequency that applications needs to be monitored. The authors evaluate their architecture on a real Cloud testbed using applications that exhibit heterogeneous behaviors. The achieved results show that the architecture is low intrusive, able to monitor resources and applications, detect SLA violations, and automatically suggest effective measurement intervals for various workloads.