Cloud computing becomes increasingly prevalent for outsourcing IT functions. The basic feature of offering virtual data center slices to customers has been in use for some time now. So far, customers only get the raw resources, with only little insight and control of their resources. But to let customers build reliable services on top of the rented infrastructure, they need adequate monitoring and control capabilities. In the future, we expect operators to offer such functions to their customers.

In this paper, we introduce our approach towards offering a holistic monitoring system to data center customers. It offers generic monitoring information propagation and storage covering various types of resources (network, servers, and applications), all kinds of monitoring information, and all tenants. As virtualized data centers are usually large and multitenant, our solution is built with these properties in mind.

View full paper: cloudman2010.pdf.