Monitoring Application Programming Interface

The Monitoring Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is a modular monitoring component for Java-based MA environments. In particular, MAPI has been integrated in the Secure Open Mobile Agent (SOMA) platform.

MAPI exploits the Java Virtual Machine Profiler Interface (JVMPI) to collect several application-level events produced by Java applications (e.g., object allocation and method invocation). In addition, it employs the Java Native Interface (JNI) technology to make possible the integration with platform-dependent native monitoring mechanisms, which we have currently implemented for Windows NT, Solaris and Linux. MAPI encapsulates also legacy SNMP components and filters their information to yield aggregated monitoring indicators, thus limiting the overhead due to long sequences of SNMP requests/responses.

SOMA exploits MAPI to obtain monitoring information about MA resource usage, both local and remote. If MAPI is responsible for local indicators, SOMA has visibility of the global state of distributed resources by using ad-hoc mobile monitoring agents. They are in charge of collecting, filtering and transporting requested data to build a distributed framework that employs monitoring information as the knowledge base for the enforcement of suitable management policies. Monitoring indicators are exploited to control, and possibly to deny, the operations of specific mobile agents on available resources with fine granularity. For instance, in case of locally congested situation, SOMA administrators can dynamically limit the number of operations available for authorized agents of remote users, up to their complete block.

MAPI monitors the state of resources used by agents at any single host, and exploits the SOMA platform itself to coordinate different local monitoring entities. This organization produces a global vision of the monitored distributed infrastructure and performs the on-line management of SOMA-based services. Figure 1 shows the MAPI architecture that provides a uniform monitoring interface independent of platform heterogeneity.

Figure 1. The architecture of the Java-based MAPI.
 
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