Efficient and transparent instrumentation of application components using an aspect-oriented approach

Abstract

The increasing significance of Service Level Management (SLM) strongly requires an appropriate instrumentation of application components in order to monitor compliance with the defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs). The manual instrumentation of application components is very costly and error-prone and thus rather inefficient. This paper presents an approach for using aspect-oriented programming techniques for efficiently and transparently instrumenting application components. The approach is applied to the interference sensitive area of performance monitoring using the Application Response Measurement (ARM) API. Experiments with a prototype have revealed that our aspect-oriented approach fits well to the integration of instrumentation code into application components and that the runtime overhead is only slightly higher than the overhead of a manual instrumentation. © IFIP Internationa] Federation for Information Processing 2003.