Towards Role-Based Context-Aware Monitoring Systems

Abstract

Monitoring IT systems during operation is one of the few methods that help administrators track the health of the monitored system, predict and detect faults, and assist in system repair and fault prevention. However, existing monitoring solutions still suffer from several trade-offs, as current implementations impose architectural constraints on monitored systems that result in less flexibility in deployment and operation. While there are excellent monitoring systems available for some application areas, others are not adequately supported. In addition, most monitoring software is specialized to work with specific data formats, protocols, and data collection mechanisms, further limiting its flexibility. The role-based approach to modelling and implementing software promises an intuitive way to increase flexibility in modelling and implementing information technology systems. Coupled with control loop technology from the field of self-adaptive systems, we created a reusable framework of static role-playing building blocks to overcome these limitations. In this chapter, we present and discuss an ongoing research project on new concepts for creating flexible role-based monitoring systems that function in most application domains. For that, we discuss the results of a study that compared the flexibility of a variety of monitoring systems and compare the flexibility of our concept to them based on 11 criteria. We illustrate our concept by presenting and discussing a role-based model for control loop components. We further discuss our implementation of the concept as well as how it can be applied to different problem domains. Finally, we discuss the results of a quantitative evaluation of the role-based monitoring approach and present an outlook of future tasks that need to be solved in this research project.