Abstract
Modern computing is migrating towards more prevalent use of shared infrastructures and is transforming physical and fixed resources into a more dynamic and virtualized environment. This trend has proved to be a boon for advanced monitoring and profiling tools and approaches available for infrastructure operators and service providers. On the other end of the spectrum, the clients have been provided with previously unavailable flexibility and simple access to vast resources at the price of being unable to detect or correctly locate issues caused by lower layers of the new complex but abstracted infrastructure. This issue is most visible with performance degradation caused by other tenants of the same infrastructure, tenants formally invisible for other end-users. Although performance interference in shared infrastructures is a known problem that is covered by research aimed at detection and mitigation by infrastructure operators, there is a lack of research aimed at end-users and their ability to detect and locate such performance degradation. This paper covers the areas of shared networking, virtualized compute and grid compute infrastructures, gives an analysis of the specifics of each of the infrastructures, presents a novel approach for client-side monitoring and discusses the practical implementation issues. The system presented in the paper aims to provide end-users with valuable insight into underlying physical infrastructure without burdening them with complex and heterogeneous nature of monitored devices by reducing the shared infrastructure to a single representative generated node simply accessible as a generic SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled networked device. The primary aim of the system is to enable end-users to detect and locate the domain of the issue causing the performance interference and not to replace or reimplement existing general -purpose monitoring systems. The system was tested on a regional e-Infrastructure within VI-SEEM and NI4OS-Europe projects where it performed as expected.
Highlights
Shared infrastructures have revolutionized the modern approach to computing and networking
Clients are provided with advanced tools that enable all the required functionality, including monitoring of the provided resources, ranging from solutions that are provided as a part of the offered services to external monitoring tools aimed at shared infrastructures [4]
The system fulfills the specified three main requirements created by end-users: the data is presented as from a single generic SNMP node regardless of underlying infrastructure complexity, which makes it both accessible and simple while using the worst-case values for data calculation satisfies the representability requirement and helps the user locate the issue domain
Summary
Shared infrastructures have revolutionized the modern approach to computing and networking. The proposed system reduces the arbitrarily complex set of monitored nodes that form the physical infrastructure to a single user observable networked node and provides summarized monitoring data to end-users, presenting itself as a generic SNMP managed the device. By utilizing this approach, the system fulfills the first two of the user requirements. This approach solves the issue of informing the client on the context name used for each monitored resource as these identifiers are already accessible by end-users When it comes to shared networking environments, it is up to the component publishing the node sets to monitoring agents to provide suitable unique context names. By selecting appropriate security mechanisms and due to the fact that the described system is merely a sink for data originating from the infrastructure it cannot manage, as well as the fact that all the data is aggregated and reduced, the potential security risks are very low
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