Event Monitoring - Basic Concepts

Basic Concepts

Event monitoring makes use of a logical bus to transport event occurrences from sources to subscribers, where event sources signal event occurrences to all event subscribers and event subscribers receive event occurrences. An event bus can be distributed over a set of physical nodes such as standalone computer systems. Typical examples of event buses are found in graphical systems such as X Window System, Microsoft Windows as well as development tools such as SDT.

Event collection is the process of collecting event occurrences in a filtered event log for analysis. A filtered event log is logged event occurrences that can be of meaningful use in the future; this implies that event occurrences can be removed from the filtered event log if they are useless in the future. Event log analysis is the process of analyzing the filtered event log to aggregate event occurrences or to decide whether or not an event occurrence should be signalled. Event signalling is the process of signalling event occurrences over the event bus.

Something that is monitored is denoted the monitored object; for example, an application, an operating system, a database, hardware etc. can be monitored objects. A monitored object must be properly conditioned with event sensors to enable event monitoring, that is, an object must be instrumented with event sensors to be a monitored object. Event sensors are sensors that signal event occurrences whenever an event occurs. Whenever something is monitored, the probe effect must be managed.