Enabling Efficient Application Monitoring in Cloud Data Centers using SDN
Mona Elsaadawy, Bettina Kemme, Mohamed Younis · 2020
Nowadays, many cloud applications can be considered large complex distributed services. The increasing sophistication and complexity have made performance monitoring a major issue and a critical process for both cloud providers and cloud customers. Existing monitoring techniques instrument the applications to collect measurements and log them at the host nodes on which the application is deployed. Such an approach introduces overhead and can slow down the application. New paradigms such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) show promise for moving some of the measurement collection and logging functionality into the network as a lot of information can be extracted from messages exchanged between application components. Such a methodology could enable the cloud infrastructure to provide a Monitoring as a Service to applications in a transparent manner without software instrumentation and allowing for a more flexible placement of logging functionality. In this paper, we explore mechanisms to integrate application monitoring into SDN. In particular, we analyze whether switch based message filtering is feasible and we propose a customized port sniffing approach. We discuss the implementation aspects using OVS. The results confirm that moving application monitoring to the network is indeed an attractive option.