Monitoring distributed embedded systems

An examination is made of symbolic monitoring systems in which monitor correlates the activity of source code objects with lower level observable sequences of target execution events. The monitor must detect and respond to such target system states in a timely fashion in order to provide real-time monitoring response; it is consideration of this real-time monitoring constraint that sets the present work apart from other work related to distributed system monitoring or debugging. The author is interested in the costs and performance limits inherent in real-time monitoring of distributed systems in the sense that the inherent limits constrain feasible approaches to monitoring. A distributed predicate mapping system that supports a general form of distributed embedded system monitoring is described. The major results reported include a practical characterization of real-time monitoring response, an algorithm for dynamic predicate mapping, and an analysis of the computational requirements of predicate mapping that reveals the costs and resource management policies that are pertinent to guaranteeing real-time response