Monitoring and Testing with Case Observer Automata: An Industry Report

In a highly configurable system, new or changed configurations may have to be tested in a running environment. To elicit high level information from such system, a monitoring solution must be able to: sort out the interesting data, connect the related data, draw conclusions about the data, and report the conclusion. The conclusions can be helpful to verify that the new configuration has the desired functionality. To continuously monitor requirements and try to find specific erroneous pattern is helpful during testing but when the system is deployed. In this industry report we present the Case Observer Automata modeling language (COAml) that aims to solve these issues. The COAml works with workflows where related data are put into cases, which can be seen as instances of the same observation pattern. In a case, parallel activities can be traced with synchronization points and timers. The Case Observer Language can be integrated into most forms of tracing/monitoring such as business rule monitoring, coverage tracing, static program analysis, log analysis, etc. We are currently integrating the language in the xTrade Alarm Server at Xware, and there are plans to reintegrate the COAml into UPPAAL Cover.