A Simple and Generic Interface for a Cloud Monitoring Service

The paper addresses the definition of an ontology for cloud monitoring activities, with the aim of defining a standard interface for their configuration. To be widely adopted, such ontology must be extremely flexible, coping with a wide range of use cases: from the minimalist plug-and-play user, to the one governing a complex infrastructure. Our work is based on the Open Cloud Computing Interface, that is an open, community driven OGF standard allowing boundary-level interfaces to be built using RESTful patterns over HTTP. Among others, OpenStack and OpenNebula adopt OCCI. Using the OCCI ontology we define two kinds that are associated with the basic components of a monitoring infrastructure: the collector link, that performs measurements, and the sensor resource, that aggregates data and undertakes actions. This paper is a compact and self-contained revision of a document currently under discussion inside the OCCI community.