Mobile agents for monitoring distributed systems

Mobile agents can be employed to help a system adapt to diverse conditions and provide functionality that would otherwise be cumbersome and perhaps in-feasible. The benefits of mobile agents though are not without their own costs in performance and complexity. This paper gives an overview of our work in determining when mobile agents are appropriate for monitoring distributed applications. The high degree of variability resulting from the interaction between the users, applications, and the computing environment makes succinct descriptions of when mobile agents are appropriate very difficult. Our approach has been to identify the basic classes of variables in the evaluation formula and then to perform empirical tests to identify which aspects of the various components has the greatest impact. These results will then be used to identify guidelines as to when mobile agents are advantageous for the monitoring of distributed systems.