Context

Modern software systems employ large IT infrastructures hosted in on-premise clouds or using “rented” cloud resources from specific vendors. The unifying force across any cloud strategy is incremental product and application improvement against conservation of those resources. This is where monitoring of cloud applications becomes a key asset

Objective

To shed light over the status of monitoring practices in industry, we study: (a) monitoring practices and tools adoption in industry; (b) size and complexity of industrial monitoring problems; (c) the role of software architecture and software process with respect to monitoring strategies.

Method

We conduct mixed-methods empirical research featuring interviews and a web survey featuring 140+ practitioners from over 70 different organizations.

Results

Even if the market makes available a significant set of monitoring tools, our results show a rather unappealing picture of industrial monitoring: (a) industrial decision-makers do not perceive monitoring as a key asset even though the downtime of their applications correlates heavily with the level of automation and responsiveness enabled by monitoring; (b) monitoring is done with crude technology, mostly MySQL querying or similar (e.g., Nagios); finally, (c) incidents are discovered by clients rather than application owners.

Conclusion

We conclude that the road toward the industrial adoption of cutting-edge monitoring technology is still one of the less travelled, presumably in connection to the considerable investment required. Furthermore, the lack of industrial cloud monitoring standards does not help in addressing the proliferation of multiple tool combinations, with varying effectiveness. Further research should be invested in looking into and addressing these major concerns.

中文翻译：

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云应用程序监视：行业研究

语境

现代软件系统采用托管在本地云中或使用特定供应商的“租用”云资源的大型IT基础架构。跨任何云战略的统一力量是针对产品和应用的不断改进，以节省这些资源。这是监视云应用程序的关键资产

目的

为了阐明工业监控实践的状况，我们研究：（a）工业监控实践和工具的采用；（b）工业监测问题的规模和复杂性；（c）软件体系结构和软件过程在监控策略方面的作用。

方法

我们进行混合方法的经验研究，包括访谈和网络调查，涉及来自70多个不同组织的140多名从业人员。

结果

即使市场提供了一套重要的监控工具，我们的结果也显示出了相当不吸引人的工业监控情况：（a）工业决策者不会将监控视为关键资产，即使其应用程序的停机时间与通过监视实现自动化水平和响应能力；（b）监视是通过粗略的技术完成的，主要是MySQL查询或类似技术（例如Nagios）；最后，（c）事件是由客户端而不是应用程序所有者发现的。

结论

我们得出的结论是，在工业上采用尖端监控技术的道路仍然是人迹罕至的道路之一，大概与所需的大量投资有关。此外，缺乏工业云监控标准并不能有效解决多种工具组合的激增。应该投入更多的研究来研究和解决这些主要问题。