Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Using Splunk: Expectations and Challenges

Monitoring cloud-based IT infrastructures is a challenging task. Monitoring provides low-level metrics from Docker instances to higher-level application-specific metrics provided by multi-services, databases or applications log files. The observed metrics and information can be assessed to trigger policies aiming at the automation of complex management tasks within a cloud environment. This study aims to improve the current body of knowledge regarding the monitoring of applications deployed within AWS cloud environment. A case study regarding setting up a monitoring platform, namely Splunk. We conclude that monitoring should focus not only on application logs but also on tracking issues related to the containerized infrastructure. We report also on the expectations and challenges from the industry to shed light on future research directions.