Towards a unified framework for the monitoring and recovery of BPEL processes

Web services have proven to be a viable solution for interoperability issues. Since end users do not buy services, but only interact with them remotely, such complex systems end up having a distributed ownership, meaning different parts of a system can evolve independently. This has brought researchers to concentrate on run-time management issues such as dynamic monitoring and self-recovery. However, we advocate that no silver bullet has been found. All the major approaches have advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we propose a unified framework for monitoring and recovery that provides a clear separation between data collection and analysis, a common management infrastructure, and a common recovery system. Separating monitoring from recovery allows the framework to integrate different monitoring approaches seamlessly through a plug-in approach. The common management infrastructure allows us to dynamically manage the multiple monitoring approaches being used, while the common recovery approach allows us to activate advanced recovery techniques both on process instances and process definitions.