Monitoring of distributed processes with mobile agents

The proliferation of networked and distributed systems presents a need for more tool development with regard to the monitoring and maintenance of distributed processes. The goal of this paper is to present a mechanism used to collect detailed process information from various remote Unix hosts on a network. The interface to this mechanism, a GUI applet, is accessible through a Java enabled browser such as Netscape Navigator. It presents the user with a menu of choices such as which host to view, and what process information to retrieve (I/O-bound processes, numbers of processes, individual/total process usage, etc.). The requested information is retrieved and displayed in a window presented by the GUI.