Assessing the Performance Impact of Service Monitoring

Abstract

Service monitoring is an essential part of service-oriented software systems and is required for meeting regulatory requirements, verifying compliance to service-level agreements, optimising system performance, and minimising the cost of hosting Web services. However, service monitoring comes with a cost, including a performance impact on the monitored services and systems. Therefore, it is important to deploy the right level of monitoring at the appropriate time and location in order to achieve the objectives of monitoring whilst minimising its impact on services and systems. Although there have been many efforts to create Web services monitoring techniques and frameworks, there has been limited work in quantifying theim pact of Web service monitoring. In this paper, we report on experiments assessing the performance impact of service monitoring under typical system monitoring settings. The performance impact of monitoring method, monitor location, monitor processing capability, and monitoring mode are taken into consideration. Based on the experimental results, we advise on the most appropriate ways to deploy service monitoring.