Monitoring as a Service of the cloud data centre: can SDNs help?
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The recent rise of cloud applications, representinglarge complex modern distributed services, has made perfor-mance monitoring a major issue and a critical process for bothcloud providers and cloud customers. Many different monitoringtechniques are used for such applications, from simply measuringresource consumption, to application-specific measures whichinstrument the application or platform, to analyzing messageexchanges. In all these cases, the information to be analyzed islogged at the host nodes on which the application is deployed,and from there either analyzed on site or forwarded to analyzingtools. Using new trends such as Software Defined Networking(SDN) shows promise to move some of the logging functionalityinto the network as a lot of information can be extracted frommessages exchanged between application components. This raisesthe potential for the cloud infrastructure to provide aMonitoringas a Serviceto cloud applications in a transparent manneravoiding software instrumentation and allowing for a moreflexible placement of logging functionality. To better understandthe feasibility of this approach, this paper explores severalapproaches how application monitoring can be integrated intoSDN. In particular, we combine port mirroring with tunneling toenable message filtering and reformatting, and we propose a cus-tomized port sniffing approach. We provide their implementationbased on OVS, analyze their advantages and disadvantages, andprovide a comprehensive performance evaluation to understandthe trade-offs and to show that moving application monitoringto the network is an attractive option.
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