Comparing Infrastructure Monitoring with CloudStack Compute Services for Cloud Computing Systems

CloudStack is an open source IaaS cloud that provides compute, network and storage services to the users. Efficient management of available resources in the cloud is required in order to improve resource utilization and offer predictable performance to the customers. To facilitate providing of better quality of service, high availability and good performance; a comprehensive, reliable, centralized and accurate monitoring system is required. For this, the data needs to be collected from the components of CloudStack and analyzed in an efficient manner. In this paper, we present a detailed list of attributes required for monitoring the infrastructure associated with CloudStack. We identify the processes related with the compute services and its associated parameters that need to be monitored. We categorize the infrastructure monitoring, and list the parameters for monitoring parameters. Further, the proposed list is applied to three monitoring software that are commonly used for monitoring resources and processes associated with CloudStack. Developers and system administrators can benefit from this list while selecting the monitoring software for their system. The list is useful during the development of new monitoring software for CloudStack, as the functionality to be monitored can be selected from the list.