Monitoring as a service for IoT networks

Nowadays, we are surrounded by thousands of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and these devices have become a regular part of our lives. From homes to industries and from hospitals to public transports, people's lives are affected by this technology. However, transformation always comes at a price. There are several issues that IoT networks should overcome to survive in the future. These networks must cope with the rapid proliferation of smart devices, the complexity of devices' communication protocols, and the security vulnerabilities they entail. In such a context, monitoring these networks has become an increasingly complex, yet ever more essential requirement. This has led to a visible increase in the number of monitoring solutions with different functionalities. These allow for real-time detection of anomalies, failures, and threats, and the identification of devices and service types, with their dynamic usage patterns and resource requirements. However, all these monitoring solutions need to be deployed on the network infrastructure, which is not an easy work and almost the same process for all kinds of monitoring. In this paper, we present a novel platform, called IoT Network Monitoring (IoT-NM), designed and implemented to streamline the deployment of monitoring solutions. This platform offers a generic, effective, flexible, and easy-to-use monitoring deployment solution for IoT networks as a cloud-based service. This solution can be used to implement almost all other monitoring solutions based on analyzing the data inferred form network infrastructure. The proposed architecture offers an overall better user experience, allowing anyone, from full-fledged system administrators to smart home owners, to deploy arbitrary monitoring solutions in a flexible manner.