Smart CloudMonitor - Providing Visibility into Performance of Black-Box Clouds

Abstract

Migration to the cloud offers several benefits including reduced operational costs, flexibility, scalability, and a greater focus on business goals, but it also has a flip side reduced visibility. Organizations only have a blackbox view of cloud servers and while pricing and specification information is publicly available, there is limited information about cloud performance. This necessitates the need for tools that can provide greater visibility into cloud insfrastructure performance so that consumers can objectively compare and contrast the offerings from different providers. Smart CloudBench [1][2][3] is a system that allows users to run automated, ondemand, real-time and customized benchmark tests on cloud infrastructure. In this paper, we present Smart CloudMonitor - a performance monitoring tool that provides multi-layer performance monitoring capabilities to Smart CloudBench. It provides greater visibility and insight into cloud performance by monitoring both application performance as well as the corresponding resource consumption. Experiments conducted on cloud infrastructure using Smart CloudBench show the add value that Smart CloudMonitor provides to the process of cloud performance evaluation.