Service chaining in the cloud is a new trend that network operators are moving towards. Service chaining in the cloud, is the process of virtualizing various services in the cloud instances and linking them together in order to create a chain of services. Aside from the benefits that it provides for the subscribers and network operators, it needs further considerations to be fully applied and utilized. Since service availability is a key concern for network provider and operators, the availability of service chain requires careful attention.
The goal of this thesis work is to investigate how to monitor service functions that form the service chain in the cloud. By monitoring the service functions we aim to inspect the running services and report occurrence of abnormality (i.e. heavy work load), to our main monitoring platform, in order to trigger corresponding operations. We believe with monitoring the services we can increase their availability with low overhead. Our main contribution in this work, is to build a platform that can control and monitor the services in the cloud in order to enhance their availability.
