Cloud environments comprise a large number of IT infrastructures in a consolidated and centralized fashion in order to fulfill the variable IT needs of worldwide consumers. Cloud environments ensure self-service capability. The major portions of the IT infrastructures are virtualized, shared, and commoditized servers, storage appliances, and networking solutions. The failure rate is quite high and hence failure detection proactively is turning out to be a key requirement for successfully running cloud environments.

A resilient watchdog system has to be established to monitor, measure, and respond to a wider range of predefined failure scenarios. This system is further able to notify and escalate certain failure conditions that it cannot automatically solve itself.