A customizable mediation engine for metrics collection, aggregation and composition

Management applications such as accounting, intrusion detection, resource provisioning, etc. utilize various metrics to derive information needed for decision making. However, each such application is typically custom built to encode the data manipulation logic specific to the management task at hand. These custom solutions are non-reusable, nonshareable and become increasingly complex and hard to manage as they evolve to meet ever changing needs of the environment. We present Metric Service, a customizable engine that can be shared and configured to perform data manipulation operations for a wide variety of management applications. It allows application specific manipulation of raw metrics to be performed in the middleware itself and also enables integration of data from heterogeneous systems that may be geographically distributed. We also introduce MS-Policy, an XML based policy specification language that forms the core model of the proposed engine. It allows the data integration and manipulation logic, for a particular management task, to be specified in terms of metrics collection, aggregation and composition. We describe our prototype implementation and report the results of performance experiments. © 2006 IEEE.