Web services monitoring: An initial case study on the tools perspective

Web services are an XML-based technology that has been recently viewed as capable of being used for network management. An aspect of WS-based management is monitoring. Monitoring is concerned with the collection of management data reflecting the status of a managed system. WS-based monitoring has to be performed efficiently reducing machine and network resource consumption since in such systems latency, memory and traffic overhead is increased by using XML tags to describe data .This is a big challenge that requires sophisticated mechanisms to retrieve data, such as bulk or selective retrieval to be employed. One technology suggested to address this goal is the XML Path Language. Still XPath as a filtering tool raised a lot of concerns in the NetConf mailing list, about its scalability. Based on these concerns a parser has been developed by the authors to also address data retrieval in network management. This paper is an initial scalability study on these tools to identify potential problems that will need further investigation.