Pantau: A Monitoring System for KVM-Based Server Consolidation Environment

Pantau is an on demand resource monitoring system that has the goal of providing data necessary for studying KVM based server consolidation environment. Instead of always collecting all resource values from all machines, users are able to control which values should be collected from which machines without having to modify any configuration files. This greatly reduces the overhead of our system. The evaluation of expected usage scenarios shows that our system consumes less than 1.8% CPU on a physical machine that hosts 8 VMs at 10 seconds monitoring interval. In addition to normal resource usages, it provides per VM process resource usage which captures the resource usage of all VM processes on target machines at a given time interval. Using Pantau, researchers can understand better the correlation between resource usages of related machines and also the correlation between application performance parameters and necessary resources. Pantau can be easily extended to monitor unsupported resource values. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of our monitoring system along with a case study that shows how we can make use of the monitored data.