Reactive performance monitoring of Cloud computing environments

This paper presents a cross-layer reactive monitoring approach for Cloud computing environments. Based on complex event processing (CEP) methodology, our proposal monitors and analyzes performance metrics across Cloud layers to detect and repair performance-related problems. The approach utilizes novel CEP analysis rules and a new action manager framework. The proposed analysis rules are derived from a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between Cloud layers. The results of this study are used to reduce the number of monitored parameters, define the analysis rules and identify the causes of performance-related problems. Our novel action manager framework assigns a set of repair actions to each performance-related problem and checks the success of the applied action. The results of several experiments indicate that the time needed to fix a performance-related problem is reasonably short. They also show that the CPU overhead of using our approach is negligible. Moreover, experimental results demonstrate the merits of our approach in terms of speeding up the repair and reducing the number of triggered alarms compared to baseline methods.