Heuristic Approaches for Robust Cloud Monitor Placement

When utilizing cloud-based services, consumers obtain high configurable resources with minimal management effort and eliminate large up-front IT investments. However, this shift in responsibility to the cloud provider is accompanied by a loss of control for the cloud consumer. By offering SLAs and corresponding monitoring solutions, cloud providers already try to address this issue, but these solutions are not considered as sufficient from a consumer’s perspective. Therefore, we developed an approach that allows to verify compliance with SLAs from a consumer’s perspective in our former work. Since the monitoring infrastructure itself may fail, this approach was enhanced in one of our subsequent works in order to account for reliability. We introduced the Robust Cloud Monitor Placement Problem and a formal optimization model. In this paper, we propose corresponding solution approaches and evaluate their practical applicability, since the problem is NP-complete.