Monitoring of SCA-based applications in the Cloud

Cloud computing is a recent paradigm in information technology enabling an economic model for virtual resources provisioning. Monitoring remains an important task to efficiently manage the Cloud, but it is still a challenge to find a monitoring solution that reconciles the scalability, the memory consumption, and the efficiency. In this paper, we propose an extension for Service Component Architecture to allow the description of monitoring needs, and a framework that adds monitoring facilities to components and encapsulates them in a scalable micro-container that could be deployed in the cloud. Unlike the existing initiatives in the state of the art, our SCA-extension allows the architect to describe monitoring needs between components and our framework allows the transformation from the extended SCA description to a standard SCA that could be handled by any SCA runtime. This makes the task of developers and architects easier letting them focusing on the business of their components instead of the non functional property of monitoring. Moreover, our framework uses a scalable micro-container for components' deployment in the Cloud to be in line with the scalability of this environment. The evaluation that we performed proves the efficiency and the flexibility of our approach of monitoring applications in the Cloud.