A Framework for Detecting Anomalous Services in OSGi-Based Applications

The service-centric applications are composed of third-party services. These services delivered by different vendors are usually black-box components which lack source code and design documents. It is difficult to evaluate their quality by static code analysis. Detecting anomalous services online is important to improve the reliability of these applications. This paper presents a framework for detecting anomalous services in the OSGi-based applications, followed by a method of monitoring services. We propose a method to monitor the resource utilization and interaction of services through tracing thread transfer. In addition, we detect anomalous services with XmR control charts. A prototype tool was implemented and applied in an application server. The experimental results show that our method 1) is of high accuracy for monitoring the resource utilization of the OSGi-based services; 2) does not introduce significant overhead; 3) can detect anomalous services effectively.