A Generic Solution for Agile Run-Time Inspection Middleware

Contemporary middleware offers powerful abstractions to construct distributed software systems. However, when inspecting the software at run-time, these abstractions are no longer visible. While inspection, monitoring and management are increasingly important in our always-online world, they are often only possible in terms of the lower-level abstraction of the underlying platform. Due to the complexity of current programming languages and middleware, this low-level information is too complex to handle or understand.

This paper presents a run-time inspection system based on dynamic model transformation capabilities that extends run-time entities with higher-level abstract views, in order to enable inspection in terms of the original and most relevant abstractions. Our solution is lightweight in terms of performance overhead and agile in the sense that it can selectively (and on-demand) generate these high-level views.

Our prototype implementation has been applied to inspect distributed applications using RMI. In this case study, we inspect the distributed RMI system using our integrated overview over the collection of distributed objects that interact using remote method invocation.