SCOPE:

Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in current Internet systems. It brings the illusion of a virtually infinite computing infrastructure/platform that provides advanced features. Examples include dynamic resource scalability, advanced billing mechanisms that allows pay-per-use model on shared multi-tenant resources, and simplified developing platforms.

The aforementioned features are supported by the availability of handy information used by human operators or decision-making systems (supervised or semi-supervised) to enable a highly scalable system. As a result of its relevance, the wealth of systems dealing with “cloud monitoring” has been gaining weight in existing literature slowly. Note that, systems such as Amazon CloudWatch and Nagios were designed to handle this monitoring issue.
While there is an extensive literature in infrastructure or application monitoring, a lot more needs to be done, namely: 1) monitoring of virtual resources built from the infrastructure of data centres (e.g. I/O access of VMs, user-controlled scalable networks, etc.); 2) services provided to application developers (e.g. databases, container systems, etc.); and 3) applications delivered from the cloud. This is, indeed, one of the most widely repeated tasks by every project in the cloud arena. It is known that, every cloud application, platform or infrastructure reinvents its own solution. This hampers interoperability across clouds (e.g. How scalability can be controlled for a service that has VMs deployed both in Amazon and Flexiscale?), complicates management, leads to sub-optimal solutions (e.g. How do PaaS providers configure or scale their platform according to application’s load?), and is a waste of valuable time as well as resources.

If these barriers are overcome, cloud technologies will potentially change the way users build and run applications while application providers will be focusing on their primary tasks so that rebuilding existing monitoring system from scratch will be no longer needed. In addition, the increased number of VMs and applications in virtualised data centres triggers serious scalability concerns with regards to monitoring. This myriad of particular solutions to the same problem is resulting less beneficial than expected. Therefore, the needs for having a clear picture of the available systems for all levels of the cloud and a clear view on how they can interoperate among themselves (or a unique integral monitoring system for all cloud layers) have become urgent issues for industrial practitioners as well as research communities.

TOPICS:

This special issue will focus on promoting novel research on cloud monitoring systems, especially in levels that have remained unexplored (e.g. federation, replication, across cloud integration, etc.) Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Monitoring systems for cloud infrastructure/platform applications as compared to existing approaches.
• Integration of different monitoring systems in the cloud.
• Scalability of cloud monitoring systems.
• Characterisation of monitoring needs for applications, platforms and infrastructures (minimum rates, response time, maximum number of events, etc.)
• Practical comparison of different monitoring systems that aids users to select among a series of alternative systems under different conditions.
• Practical use cases of decision-making modules fed with a given monitoring system and architecture.
• Monitoring management tools that deal with cloud applications throughout their entire lifecycle (e.g. scaling decisions-making modules or application governance modules that can be exposed as a service).
• Languages and tools for expressing/automating monitoring needs.
• Mobile application monitoring.
• Virtual network probes (e.g. How to place network monitoring elements in a public cloud?)
• Evolution of multi-tenant monitoring as a function of the number of tenants.
• Policy-based monitoring across cloud providers.

Please note that, an Internet available demo or a live video (hosted by the authors) is desirable and would positively affect the review outcome.

SUBMISSION FORMAT:

Submissions must be written in English. Papers must contain novel ideas and must differ significantly in content from previously published papers and papers under simultaneous submission. Authors should prepare and submit manuscripts according to the Guide for Authors in the following link:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505611/authorinstructions

If you have any questions about paper submission or the special issue, please contact one of the Guest Editors.

GUEST EDITORS:

- Luis M. Vaquero (luis.vaquero-gonzalez@hp.com), Suksant Sae Lor (suksant.sae-lor@hp.com) and Dev Audsin (dev.audsin@hp.com), HP Labs
- Stuart Clayman (sclayman@ee.ucl.ac.uk), University College London, UK
- Prof. Jose M. Alcaraz-Calero (jmalcaraz@um.es), University of Murcia, Spain
- Prof. Dusit Niyato (dniyato@ntu.edu.sg), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- Prof. R. Nadarajan (rn@mca.psgtech.ac.in), PSG College of Technology, India