More Information on RMS

The Reconfigurable Monitoring Systems (RMS) project aims at the development of the generic architecture of monitoring systems which are customisable and adaptable to various monitoring applications, varying users needs and changing characteristics of monitored systems. Customisation and adaptability of systems possessing the RMS architecture are manifested by allowing a user of a monitoring system to:

extend the system functionality by defining and adding new functions corresponding to new monitoring purposes and applications;
configure an order in which particular phases of processing of collected data are performed and to determine places in which they are performed, in order to accommodate the system to the current needs and conditions;
define and configure different processing variants in order to customise processing of various sets of collected data, and as a consequence, to provide many abstract views of monitored systems behaviour.

Each of the above activities are assumed to be performed by every user independently and without redesigning the system architecture, re-compilation of the existing monitoring software and, preferably, without interrupting the current monitoring activities. The architecture assumes an event-driven model of monitoring. In this approach, an activity of a monitoring system is triggered by occurrences of interesting events within a monitored system. The data processed by the system are event reports which carry information about the occurred events. The key elements of the designed architecture for Reconfigurable Monitoring Systems (RMS) are:

software components, called event processors, each of which performs a certain phase of event report processing and encapsulates a monitoring function, such as visualisation of monitored system behaviour, filtering and dispatching of event reports, etc.
the data collection layer responsible for gathering information about events occurred in a monitored system and providing this information to event processors through a set of data sources;
meta-services which provide information about currently available event processors and data sources as well as allow to control event processor life cycle.
composition and configuration tools, which allow every user to build, preferably using a convenient graphical interface, his or her own personal monitoring environment consisting of event processors, to configure and manage the environment and to plug it to the data collection layer.

In order to facilitate construction of RMS systems, a component framework has been developed. It facilitates development of reconfigurable monitoring systems in object-oriented distributed environments compliant with the widely accepted CORBA standard. The framework defines elements which commonly appear in all monitoring systems built according to the specified architecture. In order to prove a viability of the presented architectural design, the defined framework has been used to develop two monitoring environments on the top of the ABng location tracking system and the MODIMOS system for monitoring of distributed object applications.