Monitoring and Assessing Energy Consumption and CO2 Emissions in Cloud-Based Systems

The development and maintenance of cloud sites are often characterized by energy waste and high CO₂ emissions. Energy efficiency and the decrease of the CO₂ emissions in cloud-based systems can be only obtained by adopting suitable actions and techniques (e.g., utilization of green energy sources, reduction of the number of physical and virtual machines, usage of the greener machines). In order to evaluate the suitability of these different actions, it is necessary to define a measure for greenness of the whole system. For this reason, this paper defines a set of metrics to assess the greenness of a cloud infrastructure. In order to provide a detailed view of the behaviour of the system and to facilitate the identification of the causes of the energy waste, metrics have been defined at different layers of the system (i.e., application, virtualization, infrastructure layers). The monitoring infrastructure that is necessary to retrieve all the data required for the assessment of the identified set of metrics is also described.