Monitoring Cloud Services through Models at Runtime: A Case in an Ambient Assisted Living Environment

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has become an important domain that provides software systems and services to support and improve people’s daily quality of life. Yet, it has not achieved large market penetration. Existing works suggest that this is primarily due to not sufficiently addressing the quality requirements posed by healthcare organizations. In particular, there is a lack of comprehensive frameworks that allow the assessment of the quality of AAL systems. In previous work, we introduced a method for monitoring cloud services using models at runtime (MoS@RT), which allows the monitoring requirements or the metric operationalizations of these requirements to be changed at runtime without the modification of the underlying infrastructure. The method and its supporting infrastructure have been successfully applied in the monitoring of cloud services, but further evaluation in other domains is needed. In this paper, we report a case study on the use of MoS@RT to monitor cloud services in an AAL environment aimed at supporting the elderly’s well-being. The results suggest that relevant quality attributes of AAL systems can be adequately monitored using MoS@RT and that the report generated by the monitoring infrastructure is useful for service providers and customers to help them ensure that cloud services meet the required levels of quality.