Monitoring and characterization of component-based systems with global causality capture

Current software development techniques and tools lack the capability to characterize function call chains in multithreaded and distributed applications built upon component technologies like CORBA, COM and J2EE. The root cause is that causal linkage information necessary to trace end-to-end call chains is private to each vendor´s runtime and often unavailable for logging or analysis. We propose and demonstrate a mechanism for maintaining and correlating global causality information of component-based applications, and using this information to expose and characterize function call chains and their associated behaviors in such multithreaded and distributed applications. Our approach relies on a global virtual tunnel facilitated by the instrumented stubs and skeletons. This tunnel maintains and correlates causal information throughout the end-to-end call chains spanning threads, processes and processors. As a result, monitoring data captured locally can be correlated and system-wide propagation of timing latency and CPU utilization becomes perceivable.