MAVIS: Managing Datacenters using Smartphones

TL;DR

MAVIS is a smartphone-based datacenter monitoring system that addresses the limitations of existing solutions, demonstrated through a prototype tested on 3,000 machines over a month.

Contribution

The paper introduces MAVIS, a novel smartphone-centric datacenter monitoring approach, and evaluates its effectiveness with real-world data.

Findings

Identified shortcomings of applying traditional monitoring to smartphones.

Proposed a design addressing these shortcomings.

Validated prototype with data from 3,000 machines.

Abstract

Distributed monitoring plays a crucial role in managing the activities of cloud-based datacenters. System administrators have long relied on monitoring systems such as Nagios and Ganglia to obtain status alerts on their desktop-class machines. However, the popularity of mobile devices is pushing the community to develop datacenter monitoring solutions for smartphone-class devices. Here we lay out desirable characteristics of such smartphone-based monitoring and identify quantitatively the shortcomings from directly applying existing solutions to this domain. Then we introduce a possible design that addresses some of these shortcomings and provide results from an early prototype, called MAVIS, using one month of monitoring data from approximately 3,000 machines hosted by Purdue's central IT organization.