A cloud or a cloud computing system typically refers to an internet-based distributed computing system supported by a shared pool of elements (e.g., storage or processing power) that are allocated to different tasks as needed. Cloud services typically incorporate monitoring capabilities that monitor the shared elements. Monitoring is fundamentally event-based. An event could be something that occurs occasionally (e.g., a lifecycle event such as the creation of an element or deletion of an element) or an event could be something that occurs periodically and forms the basis of a time-series (e.g., a record of values of an observed quantity at successive points in time.)
Typically, a cloud monitoring system processes incoming events that pertain to monitored elements and filters the events for each monitored elements (e.g., called a “metric stream”). The monitored elements may then fall into logical groups based on the filtered events and the logical groups can be used to simultaneously manipulate the elements within the group (e.g., migration or suspension).