Cloud based autonomous monitoring and administration of heterogeneous distributed systems using mobile agents

Abstract

The system administration is comprised of a set of functions intended to a multi-user computing environment to ensure reliable operations, manage efficient processing and enhance overall system performance. Due to the rapid development in wide area networks and powerful computational resources, distributed computing systems have gained widespread applications. As a result, the monitoring and managing of such large-scale heterogeneous distributed systems have become a challenging task. The existing ad hoc as well as the agent-based system monitoring and administration models are not completely suitable and reliable for managing as well as maintaining the large-scale distributed systems. This paper proposes a novel software architectural model for realizing autonomous remote system monitoring and administration in the large-scale heterogeneous distributed systems. The proposed software architecture incorporates cloud computing platform to gain scalability and location transparency. The combinations of mobile agent based approach and script based technologies are employed in the proposed model to achieve scalability, reliability and autonomy. The software architectural model is implemented on the heterogeneous distributed systems testbed and is evaluated with promising results. The heterogeneity of distributed computing systems is considered in the design by employing different operating systems, network connections and system administration domains. A detailed comparative analysis of the proposed design is included in the paper.