Using libPcap for monitoring distributed applications

The monitoring of parallel and distributed applications is a common approach for gathering information concerning program execution, for behavioral analysis of the application or of the supporting platform. The collected information can be used for the detection of errors, for performance evaluation and in its improvement. Several monitoring techniques have been explored by many different tools, depending on their goals and platforms used. In particular, the analysis made at the network level, also allows the study of the network and application protocols used by supporting middlewares and frameworks. In this paper, we report an experimental distributed monitoring tool that takes advantage of network traffic capture offered by the OS, in particular, using libPcap. Our objective was, first, to verify the possibility of capturing the traffic relating to a particular process and, based on this information, identify the other application processes and trigger the remote monitoring for those processes. This tool allows the transparent capture of the distributed application's interactions between its several processes. It is enough for the user to identify a single process and the remaining processes are discovered and monitored from the information gathered. More deep analysis can then be carried by any other tool supporting the pcap/tcpdump format, as for example, Wireshark.