Demo: Application Monitoring as a Network Service

Abstract

The recent rise of cloud applications, representing large complex modern distributed services, has made performance monitoring a major issue and a critical process for both cloud providers and cloud customers. Many different monitoring techniques are used such as tracking resource consumption, performing application-specific measures or analyzing message exchanges. Typically the collected data is logged at the host on which the application is deployed, then either analyzed locally or forwarded to a remote analysis host. In contrast, this demonstration paper presents a Monitoring as a Service prototype that uses the advances in Software Defined Networking (SDN) to move some of the logging functionality into the network. The core of our MaaS is implemented as a virtual network function where agents are co-located with software switches in order to extract performance metrics from the message flows between components in a non-intrusive manner and send the calculated measures to the clients for visualization in near real-time. The MaaS has a lot of flexibility in how it is deployed and does not require to instrument software or platforms. In our demo we show the tool in action demonstrating how users can choose to monitor different service types and performance metrics in a user-friendly manner.