Adaptive Web Services Monitoring in Cloud Environments

Cloud computing environments provide flexible infrastructures for third-party management of organizations’ information technology (IT) assets. With web services being a standard for realizing web-based business capabilities, the emergence of cloud computing will bring new challenges to different web service activities. In this paper, the authors propose an agent-based framework that employs a team of management and monitoring agents on different scopes to provides effective service management in a cloud environment. To tackle the dynamism in service operations, an adaptive monitoring algorithm is proposed. The algorithm is inspired by the congestion control approach from the TCP protocol and provides efficient, up-to-date information about service status without exhaustive monitoring. Experimental results show that the monitoring algorithm provides significant benefits when compared to the more exhaustive methods. This approach also facilitates other service activities, such as cross cloud service discovery.