Resilience-Focused Monitoring Framework for Edge Systems

Abstract

Developing applications on the edge is a difficult task, as issues arise when multiple nodes have to operate in unison. Common challenges comprise correctness, performance, and forensics analysis after a system crash. The challenges are aggravated when both edge and fog devices get in the picture, since the limited resources of some of them exacerbate any possible issue, and create the need for a robust mechanism to collect log data to make sense of the system's behavior. The envisioned monitoring layer should collect log data regarding performance and errors, protect the data until they are delivered to an external data processing facility, and be easy to integrate into the deployed system. This paper proposes C-Mon, a resilience-focused monitoring framework for service-oriented applications that tests timing constraints against live log data. The monitoring framework is integrated with OpenAPI Generator, the mainstream ReST code generator we used to generate client and server interfaces and monitoring mechanisms. Log data are cached locally on the disk of the fog/edge devices and transferred to the monitoring server only when enough CPU cycles and network bandwidth are available, at the same time enabling forensics analysis.