Monitoring System of Multi-Tenant Software as a Service (SaaS)

This research proposes a monitoring system for multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) to support the need of the services provider and tenants. SaaS is widely used to deliver a software which can be accessed remotely by users. Multi-tenant model is commonly used to develop SaaS. Using this model, a sharing application instance serves multiple tenants. To maintain service quality in multi-tenant model, the service provider needs to manage their tenants and their services condition. A monitoring system is needed to ease the process. It would be better if there is a generic monitoring system that can be configured to monitor specific SaaS application. This research proposed a centered monitoring system that provides resource usage, service usage, SLA (service level agreement), billing, and user activity metrics. The monitoring system use metrics which are defined by analyzing the tenant and service management in SaaS from previous studies. The source of data input for these metrics include the SaaS application, the server used, the SLA database, and the user database. The system architecture consists of four components: StatsD middleware, Telegraf, Monsant, and Dashboard. Monsant is a web service built to serve monitoring result by processing time series data stored in database. Dashboard was built as a web application with three main views to monitor tenants, services or resources. This monitoring system is ready to be integrated with SaaS applications. With the five metrics provided, this system can be used to support the service provider needs to manage tenants and services of a multi-tenant SaaS application.