Monitoring Extensions for Component-Based Distributed Software

This paper defines a generic class of monitoring extensions to component-based distributed enterprise software. Introducing a monitoring extension to a legacy application system can be very cost-ineffective. In this paper, we identify the minimum support for application monitoring within the generic components of a distributed system, necessary for rapid development of new monitoring extensions. Furthermore, this paper offers an approach for design and implementation of monitoring extensions at reduced cost. A framework of basic facilities supporting the monitoring extensions is presented. These facilities handle different aspects critical to the monitoring process, such as ordering of the generated monitoring events, decoupling of the application components from the components of the monitoring extensions, delivery of the monitoring events to multiple consumers, etc. The work presented in this paper is being validated in the prototype of a large distributed system, where a specific monitoring extension is built as a tool for debugging and testing the application behaviour.