Stream Monitoring in Large-Scale Distributed Concealed Environments

We present a probabilistic tracing method that captures both user and system behaviour for large-scale distributed applications. Our method extends the notion of data stream monitoring to work within what we define as concealed environments. We detail the conceptual design and implementation of our method. Additionally, we evaluate the scalability of the tracing method in a real petabyte-scale distributed data management system. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the collected trace data in three scenarios. First, we use collected trace data to examine the arrival of user events and find self-similar processes. Second, we examine the behaviour and performance of mass storage systems in a grid under concurrent requests. Third, we develop a model for prediction of user event arrivals based on historical data. Our results suggest that a probabilistic tracing method is scalable, straightforward to integrate with existing applications, and provides useful insight into the behaviour of very large-scale applications.