Java Virtual Machine monitoring for dependability benchmarking

A monitoring infrastructure is a key component in each task aimed at evaluating the dependability of a system. This paper presents a monitoring infrastructure for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which is starting to be employed in mission and safety critical application, often with real-time requirements. This infrastructure, named JVMMon, collects data about both the state and the failures of the monitored Virtual Machine. The state of the JVM was defined according to the Java Virtual Machine specification. JVMMon is constituted by three components: a monitoring agent which collects data from the monitored VM; a local monitor daemon that receives data from such agent and updates the state of the JVM; a data collector, which stores events and state snapshots in a database. The impact on the performance of the JVM has been evaluated running the SPEC JVM98 benchmark suite