Towards Real-time Monitoring of DRE Systems Using Dynamic Binary Instrumentation Middleware

Dynamic binary instrumentatation (DBI) frameworks allow application developers and testers to non-intrusively collect trace profiles from their applications in production environments. The collected trace profiles are then used to analyze system behavior. Unfortunately, applying a DBI frameworks to an enterprise distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems is not a trivial process. This is because it is the end-user’s responsibility to manually collect traces from each host, integrate the many (disconnect) execution traces, and provide meaningful analysis. Moreover, it is hard for DRE system developers and testers to dynamically control DBI frameworks to ensure minimal impact on quality-of-service (QoS) while collecting enough metrics to support analysis—especially for long running enterprise DRE systems. This work-in-progress paper therefore provides two contributions to instrumentation of enterprise DRE systems. First, this paper discusses how DBI frameworks can be integrated with dynamic instrumentation middleware to bridge the gap of autonomously collecting trace profiles and metrics from enterprise DRE systems in a non-intrusive manner. Secondly, this paper discusses what research questions we plan to address as a result of integrating DBI frameworks with dynamic instrumentation middleware. Keywords-dynamic binary instrumentation, dynamic instrumentation middleware, enterprise DRE systems, Pin, OASIS