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by Bill de hÓra.
Original Post: The Fog of Service
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The 'classic' monitoring technologies (such as snmp and syslog) are mostly concerned with machine and server level events, and don't support the monitoring of things that are going on at the higher messaging and application levels. Importantly the intepretation of system level events with business level issues is mostly non-existent in IT. On a project last year we used a combination of XMPP, RDF and Atom to provide a monitoring system that informed on multiple layers of the stack. It's proving useful since the system can report on events at abitrary levels and from arbitrary nodes. It's also semantically rudimentary, for example it doesn't interpret collections of low level events as a potential business issue - the implications of such events are left to the people operatoring the system which requires domain knowledge. It may be that NASA, Fedex, Formula One crews, and the odd supply chain have figured out how to make sense of telemmetry noise, but it's an open issue for Web and Service oriented systems. It would be so much better if we had protocols and formats for this. There do not seem to be WS or Semweb specs targeted at this area (if I missed any, please let me know). My current thinking is the most useful feature direction for such a monitoring system would be to allow matchers to register a pattern or set of patterns that it should be notified about. Which sounds a lot like a blackboard architecture or a content based non-router....
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