A unified monitoring framework for distributed information system management

With the increasing complexity and scale of business processes, and the underlying information systems, there is a demand for monitoring the complicated business processes spanning multiple enterprise information systems distributed in a heterogeneous IT environment. This paper presents a unified monitoring framework for such distributed information system management. This framework utilizes Web service and messaging queue technologies to collect log data for business process visualization and monitoring and decouples the tight links between the monitoring tool and the components to be monitored. XML is used to define a universal data format for different types of information to be monitored. A prototype tool is implemented and presented to demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the proposed framework, and experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance overhead introduced by the monitoring.