A scalable monitor for large systems

Current monitoring solutions are not well suited to monitoring large data centers in different ways: lack of scalability, scarce representativity of global state conditions, inability in guaranteeing persistence in service delivery, and the impossibility of monitoring multitenant applications. In this paper, we present a novel monitoring architecture that strives to address these problems. It integrates a hierarchical scheme to monitor the resources in a cluster with a distributed hash table (DHT) to broadcast system state information among different monitors. This architecture strives to obtain high scalability, effectiveness and resilience, as well as the possibility of monitoring services spanning across different clusters or even different data centers of the cloud provider. We evaluate the scalability of the proposed architecture through an experimental analysis and we measure the overhead of the DHT-based communication scheme.