Towards a Monitoring Framework for Cloud Services

Network-based cloud computing is considered to be an emerging model of business computing, which maintains configurable resources such as processors, networks, storage, operating systems, database, and servers. One of the most successful paradigms that can be configured over the cloud is the Service oriented Architecture (SoA) environment, which provides a layered architecture for organising software resources as services, so that they can be deployed, discovered and combined to produce new services. The coordination of the interactions between such services is one of the key challenges of SoA, as any failings in these services could lead to lack of availability, which may violate Service Level Agreements. Therefore, this paper harnesses the capability of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in order to automate the creation and integration of a Protocol service, which is used to coordinate interactions between services. It is then linked with a real-time Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) dashboard, which is created automatically to monitor the performance of the Protocol service. The approach is implemented as a tool; it also configures the cloud interface to interact with these services.