Operation management for a private cloud infrastructure faces many challenges including efficient resource allocation, load-balancing, and quick response to real-time workload changes. Traditional manual IT operation management is inadequate for this highly dynamic and complex environment. This work presents a distributed service architecture which is designed to provide an automated, shared, off-site operation management service for private clouds. The service architecture incorporates

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... t concepts such as: Metric Templates for minimising the network overhead for transmission of cloud metrics; a Cloud Snapshot that provides a global view of the current status of the cloud, supporting optimal decision making; and a Calendar-based Data Storage Model to reduce the storage required for cloud metric data and increase analysis performance. A proactive response to cloud events is generated based on statistical analysis of historical metrics and predicted usage. The architecture, functional components and operation management strategies are described. A prototype implementation of the proposed architecture was deployed as a service on the IBM SmartCloud. The effectiveness and usability of the proposed proactive operation management solution has been comprehensively evaluated using a simulated private cloud with dynamic workloads.