Monitoring Service-Oriented Architecture Systems

Master Specialization: Information Systems
Topic Aproval date: 18/02/09
Orientation: research

Student: Marc Oriol
Thesis advisor(s): Jordi Marco, Xavier Franch
Contact: jmarco at lsi.upc.edu

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become one of the most successful architectural styles used for the development of software systems. The main characteristic of this architecture is the construction of software solutions based on a group of services that communicate with each other. However, this high coupling also implies a strong dependency among the different components of the SOA system. A failure of a service could imply the malfunction or failure of the whole system. Monitoring an SOA system is essential to ensuring reliable operations and resolving problems quickly, in order to deliver customer service at agree-upon levels. However, the very nature of an SOA system makes monitoring it difficult. Currently, a lot of emerging approaches proposes different solutions to monitoring SOA systems. This Master Thesis will develop a systematic review analyzing the emerging approaches that tackle monitoring SOA systems. This review will be complemented with some first steps to an approach based on an SOA system itself that uses a monitoring technique to provide runtime Quality of Service (QoS) information that is needed to detect and eventually correct Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations.