eMIVA: tool support for the instrumentation of critical distributed applications

In recent years, enterprise applications faced an ever growing complexity of business processes as well as an increase in the number of interacting hardware and software components. The ability to efficiently manage their IT infrastructure up to the application level is therefore critical to a company's success and results in rising importance of Service Level Management (SLM) technologies [6, 10]. As a prerequisite for application management, monitoring and instrumentation techniques face growing interest. Depending on the criticality of an application, monitoring can either be based on statistical samples, or can require monitoring of each request handled by the system, e.g. for validation or verification purposes. While most enterprise applications belong to the first category, air traffic control scenarios are an example for the second category. Here, even a statistically small number of slow requests may result in dangerous situations or fatal accidents.