Design of an Agent Based Monitoring Framework for Federated Clouds

—In the last years, the Cloud services market experienced an extremely rapid growth, which may lead to severe scalability problems. Therefore, in order to cope with the resource capacity limits of a single Cloud provider, as well as to address the vendor lock-in problem associated to the choice of a single proprietary Cloud solution, the concept of federating multiple heterogeneous organizations is receiving an increasing attention by the key players in the Cloud services market; this model enables the implementation of environmental diversity for Cloud applications and overcomes the provisioning and scalability limits of a single Cloud. One of the main issues within a Cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. In this work we present an agent based approach to monitor the user’s Cloud environment provided by the federation: a multi-layer architecture is proposed where each part aims at monitoring different aspects of the multi-Cloud infrastructure, starting from the detection of critical conditions on low level parameters for the computational units and composing different monitoring levels in order to check the federated SLA.