OASIS: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Dynamic Instrumentation of Enterprise Distributed Real-Time and Embedded Systems

Performance analysis tools for enterprise distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems require instrumenting heterogeneous sources (such as application- and system-level hardware and software resources). Traditional techniques for software instrumentation of such systems, however, are tightly coupled to system design and metrics of interest. It is therefore hard for system testers to increase their knowledge base and analytical capabilities for enterprise DRE system performance using existing instrumentation techniques when metrics of interest are not known during initial system design. This paper provides two contributions to research on software instrumentation for enterprise DRE systems. First, it presents OASIS, which is service-oriented middleware for instrumenting enterprise DRE systems to collect and extract metrics without design time knowledge of which metrics are collected. Second, this paper empirically evaluates OASIS in the context of a representative enterprise DRE system from the domain of shipboard computing. Results from applying OASIS to a representative enterprise DRE system show that its flexibility enables DRE system testers to precisely control the overhead incurred via instrumentation.