Spearmints: hardware support for performance measurements in distributed systems

Spearmints, a system of hardware components that can be easily interfaced to the nodes of an instrumented distributed system for monitoring or evaluation using event-triggered measurements, is described. Each machine of the target system must have one sensor that collects relevant events and marks them with global time stamps. The sensors can be attached to a common measurement system that samples the marked events on- or offline, orders them chronologically, and analyzes the resulting sequence. The design of Spearmints is based on providing a simple and universal tool that causes little interference and furnishes highly accurate measurements in distributed systems. As Spearmints only requires standard interfaces with its integration into an object system and its connection to a measurement system, it permits the use of a wide range of measurement systems for the evaluation of a variety of distributed systems.<>