An organic computing approach to sustained real-time monitoring

System monitoring is not only the key to system and application optimization, but also provides the fundamental functionality for adaptive and self-configuring systems. In this paper we describe a novel approach to monitoring based on biologically inspired methods, which not only suits traditional requirements in generating a detailed and pristine system state image, but also complies with the dedicated needs of self-configuring systems. As a beneficial side-effect, the proposed monitoring approach is inherently fault-tolerant and scalable with system size.