Metric Service : A Mediation Engine for Metrics Collection, Aggregation and Composition

Various instrumented systems produce metrics that capture the state of the system at different points of time. These could be in the form of logs written to disk or data records made available to interested consumers through messaging systems. Management applications utilize such metrics to derive information needed for decision making. Such applications include accounting, fault handling, intrusion detection, resource provisioning etc. However, each such application is typically custom built to encode the data manipulation logic specific to the management task at hand. These custom solutions are non-reusable, non-shareable and become increasingly complex and hard to manage as they evolve to meet ever changing needs of the environment. We present Metric Service, a mediation engine that can be shared and configured to perform data manipulation operations for a wide variety of management applications. It allows application specific manipulation of raw metrics to be performed in the middleware itself and also enables integration of data from heterogeneous
systems that may be geographically distributed. We also introduce MS-Policy, an XML based policy specification language that forms the core of the proposed engine. It allows the data integration and manipulation logic, for a particular management task, to be specified in terms of metrics collection, aggregation and composition. We describe our prototype implementation and report the results of performance experiments.

By: Arun Kumar, Vikas Agarwal

Published in: RI05002 in 2005

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