Unified monitoring and analytics in the cloud

Abstract

Modern cloud applications are distributed across a wide range of instances of multiple types, including virtual machines, containers, and bare metal servers. Traditional approaches to monitoring and analytics fail in these complex, distributed and diverse environments. They are too intrusive and heavy-handed for short-lived, lightweight cloud instances, and cannot keep up with rapid the pace of change in the cloud with continuous dynamic scheduling, provisioning and auto-scaling. We introduce a unified monitoring and analytics architecture designed for the cloud. Our approach leverages virtualization and containerization to decouple monitoring from instance execution and health. Moreover, it provides a uniform view of systems regardless of instance type, and operates without intervening with the end-user context. We describe an implementation of our approach in an actual deployment, and discuss our experiences and observed results.