An architecture for co-ordinated monitoring for multi-provider cloud platforms

In recent years there has been a considerable research surrounding multi-provider cloud platforms. Various architectures for realizing such systems have been proposed. However, most of this research has overlooked (or mentioned in passing) a vital aspect for the multi-provider deployment of platforms: the design of a monitoring systems to co-ordinate the monitoring systems in those platforms. This paper presents an architecture for a centralized monitoring system that coordinates the operation of individual domain-dependent monitoring systems. Our architecture enables the possibility for a global administrator to centrally define resource specific monitoring policies which can then be cascaded to the respective monitoring sub-systems. Owners of those sub-systems can also define their own policies based on the cascaded policies and their own requirements and preferences. We demonstrate with an example how this can be achieved within our innovative architecture.