Goal-driven adaptive monitoring of SOA systems

Abstract

The advent of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabled implementation of IT systems of increasing complexity, rendering effective monitoring a nontrivial task. The inherent scale and dynamism of such systems does not allow for simultaneous monitoring of all system elements without introducing noticeable overhead. Therefore, an important challenge arises in the field of SOA monitoring. There is a need for a solution which enables on-demand adjustment of the monitoring process in accordance with the demands of system administrators and the changing conditions of the execution environment. The paper addresses the identified need by proposing the concept of goal-driven adaptive monitoring, capable of performing dynamic management of the monitoring process. The proposed concept is used for designing the Dynamic Adaptive Monitoring Framework, referred to as DAMON, which can be installed in an existing SOA environment to provide it with adaptive monitoring features. For the purpose of evaluation, a prototype of the DAMON framework was implemented on the basis of the OSGi technology. The evaluation, presented in the paper, not only verified the functional aspects of DAMON, but it also proved that the framework can decrease the monitoring overhead in large-scale dynamic systems.