An approach to monitor application states for self-managing (autonomic) systems

Autonomic Computing has gained widespread attention over the last few years for its vision of developing applications with autonomic or self-managing behaviors[1]. One of the most important aspects of building autonomic systems is the ability to monitor applications and generate corrective actions should exceptions occur. The problem lies in those applications where source code is not available and therefore it is virtually impossible to modify the application code to include monitoring functions, or the application code is too tangled with other components which make modification difficult. This hinders the inclusion of autonomic features in many of the legacy applications. In this report, we will describe an approach to build generic monitoring systems for legacy applications.