A real-time distributed hardware health monitoring framework

Health monitoring involves sensing, reporting, and sometimes adjusting the states of objects or nodes remotely. This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time distributed hardware health monitoring framework, assuming a homogeneous set of hardware nodes. The framework consists of sensor components operating at the nodes, and visualization components operating at monitoring stations. A service-oriented software architecture naturally lends itself to fit such a framework. As the primary focus and case study, the paper presents the implementation of a system to monitor the status of a collection of computers, where the sensors are hardware probes and counters such as CPU probes and performance counters.