  Distributed monitoring plays a crucial role in managing the activities of
cloud-based datacenters. System administrators have long relied on monitoring
systems such as Nagios and Ganglia to obtain status alerts on their
desktop-class machines. However, the popularity of mobile devices is pushing
the community to develop datacenter monitoring solutions for smartphone-class
devices. Here we lay out desirable characteristics of such smartphone-based
monitoring and identify quantitatively the shortcomings from directly applying
existing solutions to this domain. Then we introduce a possible design that
addresses some of these shortcomings and provide results from an early
prototype, called MAVIS, using one month of monitoring data from approximately
3,000 machines hosted by Purdue's central IT organization.
