A service oriented monitoring framework for soft real-time applications

The advancements in distributed computing have driven the emergence of Service Oriented infrastructures that allow for on-demand provision of ICT assets. Taking into consideration the complexity of distributed environments, significant challenges exist in providing and managing the offered on-demand resources with the required level of Quality of Service (QoS), especially for real-time interactive multimedia applications. Monitoring mechanisms are a fundamental part in service-based platforms that support realtime QoS guarantees by providing coherent and consistent real-time attributes at various levels of the infrastructure (application, network, storage, processing). In this paper we present an architectural design and implementation of a complete monitoring framework for measuring QoS at both application and infrastructure levels targeting trigger events for runtime adaptability of resource provisioning estimation and decision-making. We also demonstrate the operation of the implemented mechanism and evaluate its effectiveness using an application scenario, namely Film Postproduction.