Integrated Monitoring Software for Application Service Managers

In today's data centers, many application services share the same physical/virtual devices and affect each other. Therefore, application service managers need to spend a lot of time monitoring the application services by investigating a wide range of historical data about the shared devices. In this paper, integrated monitoring software for a wide range of historical data, which shortens the transition time (i.e., the time to switch from one historical data to another) by collecting and processing the historical data, is proposed and evaluated. Five basic historical data formats for automatically creating both well-organized historical data and relation data for the historical data are also proposed. The formats help application service managers by eliminating the need for the additional software development, which was otherwise required for each application service. Surveys on application service managers in a SaaS provider for over 50 000 companies show that about 98.6% of monitoring tasks can be covered by the five basic data formats and that the integrated monitoring software reduces the transition times for switching between historical data by about 54.7% compared to those with conventional monitoring software. These results suggest that the proposed integrated monitoring software is effective not only for reducing the time required for monitoring application services, but also for enhancing the overall service availability of SaaS providers' systems.