research-article

Non-intrusive, out-of-band and out-of-the-box systems monitoring in the cloud

Authors:

Todd MummertAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 42, Issue 1

Pages 249 - 261

https://doi.org/10.1145/2637364.2592009

Published: 16 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The dramatic proliferation of virtual machines (VMs) in datacenters and the highly-dynamic and transient nature of VM provisioning has revolutionized datacenter operations. However, the management of these environments is still carried out using re-purposed versions of traditional agents, originally developed for managing physical systems, or most recently via newer virtualization-aware alternatives that require guest cooperation and accessibility. We show that these existing approaches are a poor match for monitoring and managing (virtual) systems in the cloud due to their dependence on guest cooperation and operational health, and their growing lifecycle management overheads in the cloud.

In this work, we first present Near Field Monitoring (NFM), our non-intrusive, out-of-band cloud monitoring and analytics approach that is designed based on cloud operation principles and to address the limitations of existing techniques. NFM decouples system execution from monitoring and analytics functions by pushing monitoring out of the targets systems' scope. By leveraging and extending VM introspection techniques, our framework provides simple, standard interfaces to monitor running systems in the cloud that require no guest cooperation or modification, and have minimal effect on guest execution. By decoupling monitoring and analytics from target system context, NFM provides ``always-on'' monitoring, even when the target system is unresponsive. NFM also works ``out-of-the-box'' for any cloud instance as it eliminates any need for installing and maintaining agents or hooks in the monitored systems. We describe the end-to-end implementation of our framework with two real-system prototypes based on two virtualization platforms. We discuss the new cloud analytics opportunities enabled by our decoupled execution, monitoring and analytics architecture. We present four applications that are built on top of our framework and show their use for across-time and across-system analytics.

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Index Terms

Non-intrusive, out-of-band and out-of-the-box systems monitoring in the cloud
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. System management
        Centralization / decentralization
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Distributed systems organizing principles

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review Volume 42, Issue 1

Performance evaluation review

June 2014

569 pages

ISSN:0163-5999

DOI:10.1145/2637364

Editors:
Derek Eager
University of Saskatchewan
,
Carey Williamson
University of Calgary

Issue’s Table of Contents

SIGMETRICS '14: The 2014 ACM international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
June 2014
614 pages
ISBN:9781450327893
DOI:10.1145/2591971
General Chairs:
Sujay Sanghavi
The University of Texas at Austin
,
Sanjay Shakkottai
The University of Texas at Austin
,
Program Chairs:
Marc Lelarge
INRIA, France
,
Bianca Schroeder
University of Toronto

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 16 June 2014

Published in SIGMETRICS Volume 42, Issue 1

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https://doi.org/10.1109/MNET.011.1900321
Borisaniya BPatel D(2019)Towards virtual machine introspection based security framework for cloudSādhanā10.1007/s12046-018-1016-644:2Online publication date: 25-Jan-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-018-1016-6
Wang CChen XJia WLi BQiu HZhao SCui HSeshan SBanerjee S(2018)PloverProceedings of the 15th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3307441.3307483(483-499)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3307441.3307483
Nadgowda SIsci CBal M(2018)DéjàVuProceedings of the 19th International Middleware Conference Industry10.1145/3284028.3284031(17-24)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2018
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