Event-based Monitoring And Management Of The Distributed System

With the increasing complexity of distributed systems, run-time monitoring and management have become an essential service for improving the system performance and reliability. This paper proposed a combination of monitoring probes and complex event processing (CEP) technology to achieve a new method for distributed system monitoring, which can perform run-time automated management for distributed systems, improve monitoring and management efficiency.A JMX based monitoring probe platform is employed on top of the managed resources to provide a common management interface, which standardizes runtime deployment, meta-data generation, location and configuration of monitoring components as probes. Since all monitoring components in the system are wrapped in probes and loaded by the probe platform, meta-data structures and operation calls are unified and compatible with the existing JMX products.Efficiency and reliability of monitoring information transmission in the network are also considered. This is achieved by using the event driven mode and expanded event filters. Monitoring events are filtered and encapsulated in messages during the transmission from probes to the management server.The management server adopts the complex event processing technology to analyze the high volume of monitoring events and perform event time- sequence correlation in real-time, which plays an important role in decision support of monitoring service. The management rules abstract higher-level management events, using SQL-like syntax to describe filtering, correlation and aggregation over basic monitoring events. Once the management events are found, the corresponding decisions will be triggered to perform system auto-management, by manipulating probes on the probe platforms.The aforementioned distributed monitoring infrastructure has been used in an actual simulation platform. According to the project demands and practical experience, at the end of this paper, several cases are introduced to demonstrate management process such as event definition, rule configuration, event action binding and decision execution.