Adaptive Monitoring: Application of Probing to Adapt Passive Monitoring

Abstract

Availability of good quality monitoring data is a vital need for management of today’s data centers. However, effective use of monitoring tools demands an understanding of the monitoring requirements that system administrators most often lack. Instead of a well-defined process of defining a monitoring strategy, system administrators adopt a manual and intuition-based approach. In this paper, we propose to replace the ad-hoc, manual, intuition-based approach with a more systematic, automated, and analytics-based approach for system monitoring. We propose an adaptive monitoring framework where end-to-end probing-based solutions are used to adapt the at-a-point monitoring tools. We present a systematic framework to use probes for adjusting monitoring levels. We present algorithms to select and analyze probes and to dynamically adapt the monitoring policies based on probe analysis. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution using real-world examples as well as simulations.