MTracer: A Trace-Oriented Monitoring Framework for Medium-Scale Distributed Systems

Abstract

Trace-oriented runtime monitoring is a very effective method to improve the reliability of distributed systems. However, for medium-scale distributed systems, existing trace-oriented monitoring frameworks are either not powerful or efficient enough, or too complex and expensive to deploy and maintain. In this paper, we present MTracer, which is a lightweight trace-oriented monitoring system for medium-scale distributed systems. We have proposed and implemented several optimizations to improve the efficiency of the monitor server in MTracer. A web-based frontend is also provided to visualize a monitored system from different perspectives. We have validated MTracer in a real medium-scale environment. The results indicate that MTracer has a very lower overhead, and can handle more than 4000 events per second.