Private cloud computing has been recently pushed as a promising solution to more efficiently exploit available hardware equipment and quickly reconfigure software components depending on the current load. However, private cloud computing, and in particular the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, has been primarily adopted only by large companies, at least so far. In fact, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) usually have difficulties in adopting the private computing paradigm, either since they are not able to afford the cost of off-the-shelf proprietary solutions or they do not have the know-how required to adapt open-source solutions to their own requirements. The paper presents our novel framework for Easy Monitoring and Management of IaaS (EMMI) solutions, with the main objective of making easier the adoption of the private cloud paradigm. The EMMI framework is based on open-source software components, i.e., OpenStack for IaaS management, Collectd for distributed system monitoring, and Apache jk for load balancing, allowing to adopt the IaaS model easily and in a cost effective manner. The reported performance results demonstrate that the EMMI framework efficiently supports two primary features of the IaaS model, i.e., failover and scale-out, promptly identifying crucial events and autonomously taking suitable countermeasures.