Towards an Out-of-the-Box Cloud Application Monitoring Framework

Abstract

To monitor virtual machines and applications in IaaS cloud environments, cloud providers require installing agents in tenants' virtual machines. It is inconvenient for users and is prone to cyber attacks. In this paper, we propose oMon, a out-of-the-box application monitoring framework for cloud applications. oMon does not requires installing any agent in the guest OS of tenants' virtual machines, thus is transparent to the cloud applications, and could supports a wide range of guest OS and legacy systems. We design and implement several modules in oMon which can not only obtain the performance statistics of tenants' virtual machines, but also collect information on process, system call, disk I/O and network communications. oMon also enables comprehensive analysis by correlating these information. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of oMon through several experiments. The results shown that oMon could successfully provide fine-grained monitoring for cloud applications with small overhead.