Software runtime monitoring with adaptive sampling rate to collect representative samples of execution traces

Abstract

Monitoring software systems at runtime is key for understanding workloads, debugging, and self-adaptation. It typically involves collecting and storing observable software data, which can be analyzed online or offline. Despite the usefulness of collecting system data, it may significantly impact the system execution by delaying response times and competing with system resources. The typical approach to cope with this is to filter portions of the system to be monitored and to sample data. Although these approaches are a step towards achieving a desired trade-off between the amount of collected information and the impact on the system performance, they focus on collecting data of a particular type or may capture a sample that does not correspond to the actual system behavior. In response, we propose an adaptive runtime monitoring process to dynamically adapt the sampling rate while monitoring software systems. It includes algorithms with statistical foundations to improve the representativeness of collected samples without compromising the system performance. Our evaluation targets five applications of a widely used benchmark. It shows that the error (RMSE) of the samples collected with our approach is 9%–54% lower than the main alternative strategy (sampling rate inversely proportional to the throughput), with 1%–6% higher performance impact.