A scalable monitoring architecture for managing distributed multimedia systems

Monitoring is an essential process to observe and improve the reliability and the performance of large-scale distributed multimedia (LDM) systems. Monitoring events generated by LDM systems is necessary for observing the run-time behavior of LDM systems and providing status information required for managing such applications. However, correlated events are generated concurrently and could be distributed in various locations in the applications environment. Furthermore, diierent media streams in LDM systems may have diierent management requirements that must be considered in the monitoring architecture. In this paper, we present a scalable high-performance monitoring architecture for LDM systems using a hierarchical event ltering mechanism to detect and classify interesting local and global events and perform the appropriate action speciied with this event or disseminate the monitoring information to the corresponding end-points management applications. We also describe how this monitoring architecture improves the reliability and the performance of an interactive multimedia distance learning system via supporting fault recovery and performance tuning applications.