Cloud providers can optimize resource utilization and energy consumption by finding patterns in their usage. One way of finding such patterns is to study the history of Cloud resources activity. This approach is known as Cloud provenance. Provenance can also be used to track errors and faults in Cloud services. We have developed a provenance framework for research Clouds in order to find the history of the resources usage. Our framework collects provenance data in response to the request of users for IaaS scheme. In this paper, we discuss a provenance framework in the Clouds and present different possible approaches of the provenance collection process. To the best of our knowledge, provenance is yet to be addressed in the Cloud environment. Hereby, we provide details of our proposed framework and present its performance evaluation. The experimental results show that our provenance framework has a very low overhead (less than milliseconds), which makes it ideal for the Cloud infrastructure.

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