Infrastructure Management and Monitoring in Hybrid Cloud Environment

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1 Infrastructure Management and Monitoring in Hybrid Cloud Environment Komal Gohil #1 # Cloud Services Practice Research and Innovation, igate Computer Systems Ltd. SEEPZ, Mumbai, India 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, System Management,Hybrid Environment, Hybrid Cloud, Operations, ITSM, ITIL. I. INTRODUCTION 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. WHY MANAGE AND MONITOR 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. MANAGEMENT AND MONITORING LAYERS Fig. 1 Management and Monitoring Layers 72

2 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. IV. CHALLENGES FACED IN TODAY S ENVIRONMENT Over a period of time, customer has accumulated hardware, software, applications, services etc. from multiple vendors and now with the availability of Cloud infrastructure, it has added another dimension to it. This heterogeneous environment posesa number of challenges as listed below: Multiple Management Tools and Consoles Each environment has its own set of management-monitoring technology and console, e.g., separate console used for enterprise for its Data Center, and anotheroffered by Cloud provider Multiple Service Desks Delays in problem identification because of environment isolation and non-integrated platforms High maintenance, training cost on management-monitoring tools sources from multiple vendors 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 comprising ofenterprise Data Center and a mix of Public and Private Clouds. This proposed design approach for management and monitoring hasfour main components: 1) People:The people component includes the various types of users who interact with the platform, e.g. end-users, Cloud network administrators, Cloud storage administrators, Cloud service manager, management and monitoring teams, etc. The end-users can raise a problem ticket and the management and monitoring team acts on it. Behind the scenes, this team interacts with the management and monitoring platform to identify the problem, create or work on event/incident tickets, perform root cause analysis, raise a change request and can also initiate release of any patches/upgrades. 2) Processes: The processes are the services or utilities that can be provided to the end users by 73

3 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, notification, etc. VI. IMPLEMENTATION The Fig. 3 shows the tools using which we implemented thehybrid Cloud management and monitoring approach. We useda combination of ServiceNow and Zenosstools. 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. 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 74

4 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 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 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. VII. STANDARD DEPLOYMENT MODELS 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. 6 Notification to ITIL 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 Standard Deployment Models 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. BENEFITS 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 75

5 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. 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. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The work reported here has been carried out under the aegis of Cloud Services Practice (R&I Group) at igatecomputer Systems Ltd. REFERENCES [1] ITIL Home. [2] ITIL and ITSM Directory. [3] ServiceNow - Transform IT. [4] Zenoss-Transforming IT Operations. ABOUT THE AUTHOR 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. 76