Incorporating virtualization awareness in service monitoring systems

Abstract

Traditional service monitoring systems (e.g., Nagios and Cacti) have been conceived to monitor services hosted in physical computers. With the recent popularization of server virtualization platforms (e.g., Xen and VMware), monitored services can migrate from a physical computer to another, invalidating the original monitoring logic. In this paper, we investigate which strategies should be used to modify traditional service monitoring systems so that they can still provide accurate status information even for monitored services that are constantly moving on top of a set of servers with virtualization support.