Brief announcement: the design of an internet-scale monitoring and assertion-checking infrastructure

• Authors: Monica Brockmeyer;Chunbo Chu
• Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
• Year: 2004

In this paper, we describe the design of a global infrastructure for monitoring and assertion-checking which is scalable and resilient to network and node failures, leveraging the benefits of distributed hash tables. Our mechanism distributes the event notification, predicate evaluation, and predicate reporting tasks across the Internet and is orthogonal to the specific monitoring techniques deployed. Our approach creates a hierarchy of event reporting and monitoring relationships, decoupling the event notification task from the monitored node and facilitating decomposition of the predicate evaluation and monitoring task if the semantics of the monitoring approach permits. The proposed infrastructure is designed for a best effort monitoring service, but may be strengthened to support stronger guarantees. The proposed has many desirable properties, including scalability, efficient routing, load balancing and good behavior under flash crowds, resiliency to node failure, including failure of monitored hosts and monitoring end-hosts, loose coupling of the monitored hosts and the monitoring task, and self-organizing behavior.