Toward an architecture for monitoring private clouds

Cloud computing is rapidly emerging as a new model for service delivery, including for telecommunications services (cloud telephony). Although many solutions are now available, cloud management and monitoring technology has not kept pace, partially because of the lack of open source solutions. To address this limitation, this article describes our experience with a private cloud, and discusses the design and implementation of a private cloud monitoring system (PCMONS) and its application via a case study for the proposed architecture. An important finding of this article is that is possible to deploy a private cloud within the organization using only open source solutions and integrating with traditional tools like Nagios. However, there is significant development work to be done while integrating these tools. With PCMONS we took the first steps toward this goal, opening paths for new development opportunities as well as making PCMONS itself an open-source tool.

Introduction

Cloud computing has rapidly emerged as a method for service delivery over TCP/IP networks such as the Internet. It disrupts the traditional IT computing environment by providing organizations with an option to outsource the hosting and operations of their mission-critical business applications. Subscribers typically access cloud services using desktop-hosted web browsers as clients or, in the case of cloud telephony, VoIP hardphones or softphones. In addition to financial benefits such as minimal capital and operational expenditure (CAPEX and OPEX) costs, the cloud model provides several technical benefits including flexible hardware and software allocation, elasticity. and performance isolation.