Health Monitoring and Control for Application Server Environments

Web applications have taken a center stage in the enterprise data center, and are becoming the foundation of an increasing number of critical business functions. The availability of such applications is a problem of critical importance. To address this problem, we present a health monitoring and control architecture for application server environments. We build on past work in the area of measuring system health by evaluating a number of parameters that convey health information. We propose a class-based model that assigns health policies to application server environments to monitor health conditions of interest and correct problems before they cause catastrophic damage. We describe a prototype implementation of a health monitoring and control system in a generalized application server environment. We propose a utility-based model to evaluate the effect of health policies on the system and conduct experiments to validate the effectiveness of our approach.