Towards monitoring cloud services using [email protected]

Cloud computing represents a new trend to provide software services. In order to deliver these services there are certain quality levels that should be considered. The provided services need to comply with a set of contract terms and non-functional requirements specified by a service level agreement (SLA). In addition, to support the fulfillment of the SLA a monitoring process should be defined. This allows service providers to determine the actual quality level of services in the cloud. In this paper, we define a monitoring process for the usage of models at runtime, specifying low- and high-level nonfunctional requirements contained in a SLA. Models at runtime provide flexibility to the monitoring infrastructure due to their reflection mechanisms; the modification of non-functional requirements may dynamically change the monitoring computation, avoiding the need to adjust the monitoring infrastructure. In our approach, models at runtime are part of a monitoring middleware that interacts with cloud services; it retrieves data in the model at runtime, analyzes the information, and provides a report detailing the issues of non-compliance of non-functional requirements.