A Monitoring Framework for Federated Virtualized Infrastructures

Monitoring and measurement is a fundamental building block for developing and testing new protocols, routing algorithms and networked applications. In a federated virtualized testbed they allow other service components and testbed-users to follow the current state of the network, and on the other hand they enable intelligent automatic decision-making, e. g. during the embedding of a virtual topology. However, it is not a trivial task to enable federated monitoring functionalities due to the cross-domain nature of the system. The heterogeneity of the federated networks (including network elements and monitoring tools) pose a major challenge. In this chapter we present a framework that tackles some of the most important related problems. We also introduce a specific ontology to describe monitoring and network measurement tasks. This semantic approach enables the flexible integration of a wide range of monitoring tools, metrics and databases. Our Monitoring Framework was created within the NOVI FP7 STREP project which federates two major virtualized testbeds, PlanetLab and Federica.