Managing cloud services is a fundamental challenge in todays virtualized
environments. These challenges equally face both providers and consumers of
cloud services. The issue becomes even more challenging in virtualized
environments that support mobile clouds. Cloud computing platforms such as
Amazon EC2 provide customers with flexible, on demand resources at low cost.
However, they fail to provide seamless infrastructure management and monitoring
capabilities that many customers may need. For instance, Amazon EC2 doesn't
fully support cloud services automated discovery and it requires a private set
of authentication credentials. Salesforce.com, on the other hand, do not
provide monitoring access to their underlying systems. Moreover, these systems
fail to provide infrastructure monitoring of heterogenous and legacy systems
that don't support agents. In this work, we explore how to build a cloud
management system that combines heterogeneous management of virtual resources
with comprehensive management of physical devices. We propose an initial
prototype for automated cloud management and monitoring framework. Our ultimate
goal is to develop a framework that have the capability of automatically
tracking configuration and relationships while providing full event management,
measuring performance and testing thresholds, and measuring availability
consistently. Armed with such a framework, operators can make better decisions
quickly and more efficiently.