Komal Gohil et al. / IJAIR
ISSN: 2278-7844
Infrastructure Management and Monitoring in
Hybrid Cloud Environment
Komal Gohil#1
#
Cloud Services Practice – Research and Innovation, iGATE Computer Systems Ltd.
SEEPZ, Mu mbai, India – 400 096
1
komal.gohil@igate.com
Abstract—In today’s scenario, enterprises are usingdiverse
technology platforms for their application portfolios, and as part
of their Cloud journey, they are adopting multiple Clouds. This
paper providesan approachforunified management and
monitoringof enterprise’s infrastructure, platforms, and
applications deployedin a hybrid environment comprising of
Public and Private Cloud platformsoffered by differentvendors.
Keywords—Cloud Management, Cloud Monitoring, S ystem
Management,Hybrid Environment, Hybrid Cloud, Operations,
ITS M, ITIL.
I. INT RODUCTION
Enterprises manage and monitor their IT
environments to ensure their healthy condition.
There are a variety of IT resourcesthat need to be
managed
and
monitored.
They
include
infrastructureresources such ascompute and storage
servers, desktops, laptops, routers, switches,
clusters, load balancers, and printers. In addition
they also need to manage and monitor various
platforms such as application servers, database
servers, applications, data, and users. Enterprise’s
Cloud adoption further adds to thelist
heterogeneous
virtualization
and
Cloud
infrastructure, and various services offered in either
shared or isolated form on Cloud.So it is a complex
environment to be managed and monitored. In
today’s typical scenario, organizations are adopting
a combination of Public and Private Cloud
environments while retaining part of their IT in
traditional form outside the Clouds giving rise to a
Hybrid Cloud to be managed and monitored.
Cloud management includes not just Cloud based
resource and service provisioning but also capacity
and deployment management. Once the resources
have been provisioned and are in-use, oneneed to
monitor them through periodic checks to ensure
their proper functioning and availability.
Monitoring also includes trend analysis and
reporting.
II. W HY MANAGE AND M ONITOR
Continuous management and monitoring of
ITresources provides transparency required to
assure functionality, availability, performance,
scalability, and security in highly dynamic
environments. It ensuresthat resources are working
in fine condition and are under control.
Management and monitoring can keep track of
uptime, response time and latency over-time, and
also provide alert notifications when the system
behaviour does not comply withthe defined policy.
It can detect issue before it becomes a true outage,
and can help to avert any problems arising out of it.
It keeps track of logs to support compliance audits
and offers effective security and compliance
monitoring. It has the ability to enableroot-cause
analysis on outages and other failures by allowing
tracking of the operations of a Cloud-based system,
including what happened in the lead-up to a failure.
Management and monitoring reduces complexity,
risk and overall cost. It also provides user access
and permission control, cost control and allocation,
and complete visibility into IT operation.
III. M ANAGEMENT AND MONITORING LAYERS
Fig. 1 Management and Monitoring Layers
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Komal Gohil et al. / IJAIR
Fig. 1 shows various layers that need to be
managed and monitored. The management and
monitoring is applied right from the lowest layer
which includesfacility, power, cooling, peripheral
security, etc. and goes right up to the applications
layer and users.
Physical resources represent physical devices
such as routers, switches, servers, that have to be
managed and
monitored
for availability,
performance, utilization, problems, etc. The
virtualizationlayer provides an abstraction above
the physical resources. Virtualized platform hides
the physical characteristics of a computing platform
from the end users. The software that enables the
virtualized layer is known as “hypervisor" or
"virtual machine monitor”. On top of these layers
sits virtual machines and hosted applications and
above that are users who manage or use this entire
stack. The management and monitoring is required
across the entire stack of layers.For managing a
hybrid Cloud environment, we need products which
can not only monitor the applications, software and
users but also provide mechanism for IT
Infrastructure Library (ITIL) management. This
helps us in ensuring the smooth operation of an
enterprise Data Center as well as Cloud
Environment.
ISSN: 2278-7844


Customization of management- monitoring
subsystem is very complex
Currently deployed tools do not support
multiple hypervisor technologies such
asMicrosoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, KVM,
VMware vSphere, etc.
V. PROPOSED DESIGN
To alleviate the above mentioned problems,
enterprises that are on the pathof migrating to
Cloud arelooking for a single environment for
unified management and monitoring of their hybrid
Cloud.
Fig. 2Proposed Design Approach
Fig. 2 shows the proposed design approach for
managing and monitoring a hybrid environment
IV. CHALLENGES FACED IN TODAY’S ENVIRONMENT
Over a period of time, customer has accumulated comprising ofenterprise Data Center and a mix of
hardware, software, applications, services etc. from Public and Private Clouds.
This proposed design approach for management
multiple vendors and now with the availability of
and
monitoring hasfour main components:
Cloud infrastructure, it has added another
1) People:The people component includes the
dimension to it. This heterogeneous environment
various
types of users who interact with the
posesa number of challenges as listed below:
platform,
e.g.
end- users,
Cloud
network
 Multiple Management Tools and Consoles
administrators,
Cloud
storage
administrators,
Cloud
Each environment has its own set of
management- monitoring
technology and service manager, management and monitoring
console, e.g., separate console used for teams, etc. The end-users can raise a problem ticket
enterprise for its Data Center, and and the management and monitoring team acts on it.
Behind the scenes, this team interacts with the
anotheroffered by Cloud provider
management and monitoring platform to identify
 Multiple Service Desks
 Delays in problem identification because of the problem, create or work on event/incident
environment isolation and non- integrated tickets, perform root cause analysis, raise a change
request and can also initiate release of any
platforms
 High
maintenance,
training cost on patches/upgrades.
2) Processes: The processes are the services or
management- monitoring tools sources from
utilities
that can be provided to the end users by
multiple vendors
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Komal Gohil et al. / IJAIR
way of Request Fulfilment and Configuration
Management (Service Desk), Event/Incident
Management, Problem Management, Change
Management and Release Management.
3) Tools: The tools component consists of the
monitoring tools used either in enterprise Data
Center or in Cloud environment. It also includes IT
Service Management (ITSM) tools that provide
services and can act upon service operations request
of end users.
4) Manageable Items: Any resource thatneeds to
be managed and monitored in a hybrid Cloud.
Theproposed design also hasreporting capabilities.
It provides the dashboard for managing the requests,
incident/problem tickets, change request raised and
release plan for any products. It also provides the
facility to schedule/publish the report, email
notification, etc.
VI. IMPLEMENTATION
ISSN: 2278-7844
To test the approach, we deployed two JEE web
applications (Time and Expense Management and
Purchase Order Processing) in an Amazon Web
Services (AWS) machine instance. Wegenerated
artificial load forthe application. On another AWS
machine instance, Zenosswas installed along with
the required ZenPacks. Zenosswas configured to
monitor the JEE web application and to send alerts
to ServiceNow upon generation of any event.
ServiceNow can integrate with many third party
applications and data sources. The integration of
ServiceNow and Zenossis done via Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connecter.
Zenoss will detect an event thatis not part of
standard operation of the service and which causes,
or may cause, an interruption or a reduction of the
quality of the service. Fig. 4 shows an event
generated by Zenoss:in this case the database server
is down, so there a problem connecting to MySQL.
The Fig. 3 shows the tools using which we
implemented thehybrid Cloud management and
monitoring approach. We useda combination of
ServiceNow and Zenosstools.
Fig. 4 Event Generation in Zenoss
Fig. 3Implementation Setup
ServiceNow is ITSM software. It combines ITIL
v3 (Version 3.0) guidelines with Web 2.0
technology and is offered asSaaS. Zenoss (Zenoss
Core) is an open source application, server and
network management platform. It provides a web
interface that allows system administrators to
monitor
availability,
inventory/configuration,
performance and events.
Fig. 5 Incident Creation in ServiceNow
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Komal Gohil et al. / IJAIR
On the other side, ServiceNow was configured to
create and update incident tickets directly from
Zenoss events. Events detected by Zenoss were sent
to ServiceNow as email notifications. The
generated incidents imply that there is a deviation
from the (expected) standard operation of a system
or service. Fig. 5 shows the open incident ticket in
ServiceNow that were generated by Zenoss.
ServiceNow sent an email notification to the
appropriate ITIL user upon incident creation.The
mail received by ServiceNowwas in turn sent as a
notification to the user as shown in Fig. 6.
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VII.
ST ANDARD DEPLOYMENT M ODELS
The management and monitoring platform can be
deployed in a variety of ways based on the
requirements. It can be installed in the enterprise
Data Center or it can be deployed on a Cloud.
Besides, it can also incorporate management and
monitoring services offered by Cloud vendors in
Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
Fig. 7 Standard Deployment Models
Fig. 6 Email Notification to IT IL user
When the incident management team isolates the
cause of an incident to an error or widespread
problem, the issue needs to be moved from the
Incident Management process to the Problem
Management process. When the issue requires a
change to be resolved, it is further moved to
Change Management process.
A 'Problem' is the unknown cause of one or more
incidents, often identified as a result of multiple
similar incidents. A 'Known error' is an identified
root cause of a Problem. Once a problem has been
isolated, it may require changes to be made through
the organization's Change Management process.
This can be accomplished easily directly from the
problem record.
Once there are enough changes which can make
release then the release are planned through Release
Management process, and the tasks that will be
required to execute the release. It also provides
phase automation to power the workflow around the
release process.
Fig. 7 shows the standard deployment models.
Some of the Product vendors offering SaaS model
can also manage Cloud infrastructure from multiple
Cloud service providers.
VIII.
BENEFIT S
The proposed designapproachprovides end-to-end
integration with Service Desk and Service Delivery.
It supports the entire lifecycle of ITIL
recommended management- monitoring processes.
The approachis also scalable in terms of
environment growth with respect to Cloud
environment based on the business requirements.
The key benefits that we can get using this
approach are:
 Better operational visibility and proactive
control through executive dashboard
 Better Event/Incident management through
automation
 Business continuity by leveraging technology
and vendor agnostic tools
 Integrated Service Desk based on industry
standards
 Improved control and transparency
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Komal Gohil et al. / IJAIR
Being customizable and flexible in nature, the
customers
can
customize
and/or
extend
functionality via plug- ins as per their needs. It also
has the facility to integrate with customer’s existing
monitoring tools.
This can help to provide standardized approach
for supporting, delivering, monitoring, reporting
and managing proactively with automatic ticketing,
assignment, notification and closure of incidents
reported by the monitoring tools. It also supports
early visibility and details on both outages and
services impacting the hybrid Cloud environment.
ISSN: 2278-7844
A CKNOWLEDGMENT
The work reported here has been carried out
under the aegis of Cloud Services Practice (R&I
Group) at iGATEComputer Systems Ltd.
REFERENCES
[1] IT IL® Home.
http://www.itil-officialsite.com/.
[2] IT IL and IT SM Directory.
http://www.itil-itsm-world.com/.
[3] ServiceNow - Transform IT.
http://www.servicenow.com/.
[4] Zenoss-Transforming IT Operations.
http://www.zenoss.com/.
A BOUT T HE A UTHOR
IX. CONCLUSION
Environment management involving on-premise
and/or off-premise is an on- going activity. Effective
environment management continuously provides
thetransparency and depth of visibility needed to
assure performance and scalability in highly
dynamicenvironments.
This papershows the proposed approachfor
monitoring and
managing
hybrid
Cloud
environment including IT service management. We
have come up with end-to-end solution for hybrid
Cloud and servicemanagement. It showcases the
step-wise guide to implement it in an enterprise.
Komal Gohil is a Senior Software Engineer in
Cloud Services Practices, R&I group at
iGATEComputer Systems Ltd.She has over three
years of experience in technologies such as JEE,
OSGi, ITIL, Virtualization, Cloud platforms such as
Amazon Web Services, VMware, Eucalyptus,
Windows Azure etc. and various Cloud and System
Management and Monitoring tools such as
RightScale, Nimsoft, Zenoss, etc. and Big Data
analytics tools such as Hadoop and AWS
MapReduce.
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