Techniques for delayed binding of monitoring mechanisms to application-specific instrumentation points

Online interaction with computer systems and applications allows developers to monitor, experiment with, and debug long-running resource-intensive applications at runtime. Traditionally, developers statically bind a monitoring mechanism to each application-specific instrumentation point. This approach has shortcomings for online, interactive monitoring. Namely, static binding limits portability among monitoring systems; it may mismatch monitoring mechanisms to interactive requests for monitoring data; and, predictions for the performance and execution paths of instrumentation for static bindings are left to the developer. To address these concerns, we have created a new technique called monitoring assertions that allows monitoring systems to delay binding of monitoring mechanisms to application-specific instrumentation points until runtime. Our empirical results show that we can alter the performance of both the application and the monitoring system by removing static binding requirement of application-specific monitoring systems