A Novel Approach to Client-Side Monitoring of Shared Infrastructures

Modern computing is migrating towards more prevalent use of shared infrastructures and is transforming physical and fixed resources into a more dynamic and virtualized environment. This trend has proved to be a boon for advanced monitoring and profiling tools and approaches available for infrastructure operators and service providers. On the other end of the spectrum, the clients have been provided with previously unavailable flexibility and simple access to vast resources at the price of being unable to detect or correctly locate issues caused by lower layers of the new complex but abstracted infrastructure. This issue is most visible with performance degradation caused by other tenants of the same infrastructure, tenants formally invisible for other end-users. Although performance interference in shared infrastructures is a known problem that is covered by research aimed at detection and mitigation by infrastructure operators, there is a lack of research aimed at end-users and their ability to detect and locate such performance degradation. This paper covers the areas of shared networking, virtualized compute and grid compute infrastructures, gives an analysis of the specifics of each of the infrastructures, presents a novel approach for client-side monitoring and discusses the practical implementation issues. The system presented in the paper aims to provide end-users with valuable insight into underlying physical infrastructure without burdening them with complex and heterogeneous nature of monitored devices by reducing the shared infrastructure to a single representative generated node simply accessible as a generic SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled networked device. The primary aim of the system is to enable end-users to detect and locate the domain of the issue causing the performance interference and not to replace or reimplement existing general -purpose monitoring systems. The system was tested on a regional e-Infrastructure within VI-SEEM and NI4OS-Europe projects where it performed as expected.