Variability Management for a Runtime Monitoring Infrastructure

Many software systems today are systems of systems (SoS), which are difficult to analyze due to their size, complexity, heterogeneity, and variability. For instance, unexpected behavior of SoS is often caused by the complex interactions between the involved systems and their environment at runtime. Monitoring infrastructures (MIs) provide support for engineers and support staff analyzing the behavior of SoS during development and operation. Variability plays an important role in MIs, however, while some approaches exist, managing variability of MIs remains challenging. In this paper, we describe how we applied a variability management approach to support the reconfiguration of a SoS monitoring infrastructure (MI) at runtime. Our approach provides configuration support for setting up the MI to reflect system variability. It also supports runtime reconfiguration of the MI to reflect the different monitoring tasks of users and to support evolution. We motivate our work using the case of monitoring a real-world SoS from the domain of industrial automation and discuss variability-related challenges in four monitoring scenarios. We evaluate the feasibility of our approach by applying it to these scenarios. We also demonstrate that our approach reduces manual reconfiguration effort and helps to reduce the overhead of the MI.