Dynamic Failure Detection in Distributed Environment

Failure monitoring and detection phase is a critical part in providing a scalable, reliable and high availability in current distributed environment. Heartbeat style of interaction method is a popular technique. This technique is utilised for detecting a fault where it monitors the system resources continuously in a very short interval. However, this approach has its limitations as it requires a period of times to detect the faulty node, therefore delaying the recovery procedures to be taken. This paper presents a fault detection mechanism and service using hybrid heartbeat mechanisms and dynamic maximum time allocation interval for each heartbeat message. This technique introduced the use of index server for indexing the transaction and utilizing dynamic hybrid heartbeat mechanism and pinging procedure for fault detection. The evaluation outcome indicates the use of the hybrid heartbeat mechanism allows us reducing approximately 30% time taken to detect fault compare to an existing techniques and provides a basis for customizable recovery actions to be deployed.