A multi-agent approach to monitor and manage container-based distributed systems

Abstract

The software architectures' evolution over the years has brought new challenges for the software development area. New architectural styles have emerged, such as microservice architecture and container-based distributed systems. In this sense, it can be said that service monitoring systems can be considered as an important element, since they can observe and verify the quality and progress of an application over a period of time. Automated solutions based on pre-defined intervals can result in unnecessary use of resources to identify any type of anomalies (e.g., failure or Quality of Service degradation). Considering this scenario, a multi-agent approach to monitor container-based distributed systems is proposed in this article. Such approach autonomously and dynamically decides the monitoring frequency of a container, optimizing the identification of anomalies. To evaluate the applicability of our approach, we conducted a case study on an application to manage a smart restaurant named App2SmartRest. The results reported in this article enable us to create a favorable scenario for our approach to contribute efficiently with different software development communities.