Monitoring as a service for cloud environments

Precise and dynamic measurements of physical and virtualized telecommunication environments are critical for ensuring optimized resource management and control. The flexible service instantiation and disposal of Virtual Network Functions (VNF), within geographically distributed cloud service environments, requires automated adjustments of monitoring systems. Moreover, the overall goal of reducing operational and capital expenditures, for supporting and managing a distributed monitoring system, requires such a system to be elastic and on-demand. Currently, monitoring systems are not able to fulfil these requirements. This paper introduces a novel design and specification of an on-demand monitoring as a service system for fixed and mobile cloud environments, from the low-level resources to the high-level services, across the four different domains: radio access network, mobile core network, data centre and network support systems.