A Testbed for Evaluating Anomaly Detection Monitors through Fault Injection

Amongst the features of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), their flexibility, dynamicity, and scalability make them particularly attractive for adoption in the ICT infrastructure of organizations. Such features come at the cost of improved difficulty in monitoring the SOA for error detection: i) faults may manifest themselves differently due to services and SOA evolution, and ii) interactions between a service and its monitors may need reconfiguration at each service update. This calls for monitoring solutions that operate at different layers than the application layer (services layer). In this paper we present our ongoing work towards the definition of a monitoring framework for SOAs and services, which relies on anomaly detection performed at the Application Server (AS) and the Operating System (OS) layers to identify events whose manifestation or effect is not adequately described a-priori. Specifically the paper introduces the key concepts of our work and presents the case study built to exercise and set-up our monitor. The case study uses Life ray as application layer and it includes fault injection and data collection instruments to perform extended testing campaigns.