Metric (Extended Abstract): A kernel instrumentation system for distributed environments

• Authors: Gene Mcdaniel
• Venue: SOSP '77 Proceedings of the sixth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
• Year: 1977

Metric is a distributed software measurement system that communicates measurement data over the PARC computer network, the Ethernet. Metric is used to instrument stand alone and distributed computer systems (it works in an environment of about 90 machines total and is used by about 15 machines). The system is divided into three parts: object system probes that transmit measurement events, the accountant that receives and stores those events, and the analyst that manipulates the data for the user. Measurement events, small packets of standardly formatted measurement data, are used in a way that emphasizes their independence, history and context in a running system. Events are not counts of some system activity, they are a mini-snapshot of the state of the system when some activity begins or ends. In this way they provide context about what is happening in the system, and a succession of events provides a rich history of what has occurred in the system under study. The contextual information intrinsic to an event supports its independence—the event carries with it the information necessary to describe what it is all about. Metric's robustness is a direct consequence of its simplicity, its simple communications protocols and the independence of its parts prevent failures in the Metric system from interfering with the user's object system. Most failures in the object system are unlikely to interfere with the functioning of the Metric system. The standard format of events enables the accountant to receive events from different environments in a straightforward fashion, and makes the job of data handling easier for the analyst. Another advantage of Metric's simplicity is its economy of use: object system probes use about 100 microseconds to transmit data to the analyst. Object systems that use Metric continuously transmit event data. This means the event history log maintained by the accountant can be examined after particularly mysterious crashes to determine what the system had been doing lately. The tripartite division of the analyst into the kernel, utility layer and applications layer simplifies the job of maintenance, use, and extension of the system. The kernel understands event format and acts in behalf of applications to examine data collected by the accountant. The utility layer understands global system structures and language constructs to simplify the job of data analysis and presentation. The application layer is specific code written to answer some particular questions about a system. It is usually quite small and simple. In summary, Metric is unusual because of the way it exploits the Ethernet, its insistence on standardized measurement information, its efforts to make information intelligible to its users, and its extensibility in the face of very different user environments. The isolation of Metric's parts into different machines that communicate over the Ethernet has proven to be a very effective way of achieving a remarkably robust, low cost measurement tool. Metric's emphasis upon the context and history associated with measurements facilitates the use of measurement data.