Monitoring extends to aspects like evaluating usage and performance of a resource. In principle, if we consider monitoring as a part of the service, the flexibility of the cloud paradigm should correspond to a flexible monitoring. For instance, at a given time I can decide to switch on network monitoring on a given trunk to diagnose an anomaly. It is not clear to me whether this is considered as valuable by the stakeholder and by the provider. Consider that a service level agreement approach offers an alternative, though not equally flexible, solution.
I can see from your question that you are looking at using Monitoring as a tool to evaluate the resource's performance and for troubleshooting (correct me if i'm wrong). I believe that this is useful to the infrastructure's provider so that the monitoring results can be used to diagnose potential resource problem.
From the business users' point of view, business users would expect their business application to run on reliable infrastructure and to meet their customer demands. This is where SLA comes in, an agreement between the business users and infrastructure providers.
In order to meet the SLA agreement, Infrastructure Providers must have appropriate (or even sophisticated) Monitoring mechanism to ensure infrastructure reliability, or to foresee/predict potential issues so as to avoid SLA violations.
The example I gave is misleading, and apparently restricts to troubleshooting: but this is not the case. Many needs for which monitoring is required can be anticipated by the provider: not only monitoring to ensure functionality, but also, for instance, monitoring for load balancing and resource resizing. Do you know of examples of monitoring requirements that cannot be anticipated by the provider, so that they are provided on demand?
Its pretty simple, all you need is a dynamic resource provisioning. Here i would like to recollect the fact that cloud is dynamic in nature unlike grid. Hence all kind of services( XaaS - Everything as a Service) are dynamic. Dynamic resources not only helps users but also enhances business values for the providers.
Example are in plenty, scientific experiments, video streaming of events, meteorological data, etc
Monitoring would be required if the user is not an individual but an organisation itself. An organisation would like to monitor the usage of cloud services utilization by its employees as well as to track restrictive failures from the cloud providers. It can usefull if we can have MaaS especially a third party service provider.
In my view monitoring, and in this case Monitoring as a Service is a feature. In many types of application it is a desirable feature and valued by customers. It makes sense depending on the type of the application, the target audience, the applied business model, etc. And if monitoring is available for a given application, the provider has also to figure out whether to implement it as a standard feature of the application or, as you suggested, as something that customers can switch on and off by themselves. It seems to me as another one of the many decisions related to cloud computing that pertain to the business level.
In my opinion monitoring as a service makes sense and should be part of the basic cloud SLA. Application performance monitoring (APM) feeds into many IT-governance processes like capacity planning, application life cycle management and risk analisis , to name a few. The data recorded by monitoring tools are therefore very important from a management perspective.
APM is also focussed on user experience monitoring and user experience should be included in the SLA (Well it is included in our SLA's). There is also another aspect I feel that should be added to the monitoring service and that is security monitoring. There is a move to offer Data Security as a Service (DSaaS) but that is not what I am pointing to here. I am talking more about Intrusion detection monitoring.
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