Synopsis:
The monitoring of distributed systems involves the collection, interpretation,
and display of information concerning the interactions among concurrently
executing processes. This information and its display can support the
debugging, testing, performance evaluation, and dynamic documentation of
distributed systems. General problems associated with monitoring are
outlined in this paper, and the architecture of a general purpose, extensible,
distributed monitoring system is presented.

Three approaches to the display of process interactions are described:
textual traces, animated graphical traces, and a combination of aspects of
the textual and graphical approaches. The roles that each of these
approaches fulfill in monitoring and debugging distributed systems are
identified and compared.

Monitoring tools for collecting communication statistics, detecting
deadlock, controlling the non-deterministic execution of distributed
systems, and for using protocol specifications in monitoring are also
described.

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
Volume 5 ,  Issue 2  (May 1987)