Monitoring Fog Computing: a Review, Taxonomy and Open Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews fog computing monitoring, proposing a new taxonomy, analyzing existing solutions, and discussing open challenges to advance resource management in fog environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel taxonomy for fog monitoring solutions and provides a systematic review of recent research in this domain.

Findings

Existing cloud monitoring tools are inadequate for fog environments.

Most fog monitoring solutions lack standardization and instrumentation.

Key open challenges include data standardization and real-time observability.

Abstract

Fog computing is a distributed paradigm that provides computational resources in the users' vicinity. Fog orchestration is a set of functionalities that coordinate the dynamic infrastructure and manage the services to guarantee the Service Level Agreements. Monitoring is an orchestration functionality of prime importance. It is the basis for resource management actions, collecting status of resource and service and delivering updated data to the orchestrator. There are several cloud monitoring solutions and tools, but none of them comply with fog characteristics and challenges. Fog monitoring solutions are scarce, and they may not be prepared to compose an orchestration service. This paper updates the knowledge base about fog monitoring, assessing recent subjects in this context like observability, data standardization and instrumentation domains. We propose a novel taxonomy of fog monitoring solutions, supported by a systematic review of the literature. Fog monitoring proposals are analyzed and categorized by this new taxonomy, offering researchers a comprehensive overview. This work also highlights the main challenges and open research questions.