An online monitoring approach for Web service requirements

The web service technology aims to enable the interoperation of heterogeneous systems and the reuse of distributed functions in an unprecedented scale, and has achieved significant success. There are still however challenges to realize its full potential. One of these challenges is to ensure the behavior of web services consistent with their requirements. Monitoring events that are relevant to web service requirements is thus an important technique. This paper introduces an online monitoring approach for web service requirements. It includes a pattern based approach to the specification of service constraints that correspond to service requirements, and a monitoring model that covers five kinds of system events relevant to client request, service response, application, resource, and management, and a monitoring framework in which different probes and agents collect events and data that are sensitive to requirements. The framework analyzes the collected information against the pre-specified constraints, so as to evaluate the behavior and use of web services. The prototype implementation and experiments with a case study shows that our approach is effective and flexible, and the monitoring cost is affordable.