On Challenges of Cloud Monitoring

Cloud services are becoming increasingly popular: 60% of information technology spending in 2016 was Cloud-based, and the size of the public Cloud service market will reach 236B by 2020. To ensure reliable operation of the Cloud services, one must monitor their health. While a number of research challenges in the area of Cloud monitoring have been solved, problems are remaining. This prompted us to highlight three areas, which cause problems to practitioners and require further research. These three areas are as follows: A) defining health states of Cloud systems, B) creating unified monitoring environments, and C) establishing high availability strategies. In this paper we provide details of these areas and suggest a number of potential solutions to the challenges. We also show that Cloud monitoring presents exciting opportunities for novel research and practice.