CLAMS: cross-layer multi-cloud application monitoring as a service framework

Cloud computing provides on-demand access to affordable hardware (e.g., multi-core CPUs, GPUs, disks, and networking equipment) and software (e.g., databases, application servers, data processing frameworks, etc.) platforms. Application services hosted on single/multiple cloud provider platforms have diverse characteristics that require extensive monitoring mechanisms to aid in controlling run-time quality of service (e.g., access latency and number of requests being served per second, etc.). To provide essential real-time information for effective and efficient cloud application quality of service (QoS) monitoring, in this paper we propose, develop and validate CLAMS-Cross-Layer Multi-Cloud Application Monitoring-as-a-Service Framework. The proposed framework is capable of: (a) performing QoS monitoring of application components (e.g., database, web server, application server, etc.) that may be deployed across multiple cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon and Azure), and (b) giving visibility into the QoS of individual application component, which is something not supported by current monitoring services and techniques. We conduct experiments on real-world multi-cloud platforms such as Amazon and Azure to empirically evaluate our framework and the results validate that CLAMS efficiently monitors applications running across multiple clouds.