Dynamic agent based monitoring mechanism for web services

With more and more web services appearing in the Internet, quality of service (QoS) has aroused attentions from many researchers. Only if QoS is assured, services can be widely used and the needs of customer can be preferably met. QoS has been researched for a long time and there are many approaches proposed to monitor web services, but most of them need to involve with service provider. For example, aspect oriented programming (AOP) based monitoring mechanism needs to insert codes into service source codes at service runtime; Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) based monitoring mechanism requires service provider to support the SNMP protocol. To solve these issues, this paper proposes a dynamic agent based mechanism to monitor web services, which is then applied to service oriented architecture (SOA). Through extending register functions in SOA, monitoring and management system (MMS) could get service information to generate service-related agent that monitor the service states at runtime. According to SLA, MMS evaluates quality of service with data reported by agent. To implement our monitoring architecture, Java Management Extensions (JMX) is referenced. The monitoring mechanism proposed in this paper not only doesn't need additional information from service provider, but also doesn't increase loading burden on service provider. Comparing with others mechanism of web services monitoring, ours provides more flexibility and scalability.