SimMon: a toolkit for simulation of monitoring mechanisms in cloud computing environment.

Monitoring is a precondition for intelligent management in cloud computing environment, such as dynamic resource allocation. Typically, working as an auxiliary tool, a monitoring system is expected to incur the least additional resource usage, thus the strategies to improve the efficiency of monitoring mechanisms become significant. Yet the scale and monitoring requirement of different data centers vary, we cannot determine whether a monitoring mechanism would work well in a new data center before it serves the data center. To evaluate monitoring mechanisms, we propose SimMon, a toolkit for simulating monitoring mechanisms in cloud computing environments. SimMon is designed to simulate the topologies, actions, and strategies in data collection, dissemination, storage, and management processes. SimMon provides a controllable and repeatable way to evaluate monitoring mechanisms. In this paper, we describe the requirements analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation of SimMon. We simulate several different monitoring systems and compare their cost on time and resource to evaluate the efficiency of SimMon. We reproduce two usage scenarios from former literatures to demonstrate the effectiveness of SimMon on monitoring mechanisms simulation and evaluation. We build a real-world working environment to validate the capability of SimMon on mimicking the characteristics of cloud monitoring systems. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.