Service Based System Monitoring Framework

Web Service Based Systems (SBS) are essentially distributed in nature and in most cases facilitated through third party service providers. This necessitates monitoring of the provisioning of SBS at run-time. Further, monitoring of SBS in a non-intrusive and composition-platform independent manner is a real challenge. This paper proposes a framework for monitoring the compliance of a set of pre-specified requirements of a SBS. The requirements may include behavioral properties of SBS and/or assumptions that service providers may specify in terms of events that can be extracted from SBS at run-time. A Monitor Specification Language (MSL) has been developed to specify the properties of the system to be monitored at runtime. The language has the ability to specify boolean, statistical, and time-related properties. The specifications are automatically translated into executable C programs which act as runtime monitors to monitor the specified properties by capturing run-time events from the business layer, service layer and infrastructure layer of the SBS. However, in the proposed framework the SBS runs quite independent of the monitoring functionality in a non-intrusive manner.