XML-based monitoring of services and dependencies

We present a novel approach for describing, querying and monitoring the dependencies among services in a distributed system. Until now, dependency information has to be acquired either through custom-built scripts or proprietary tools; the absence of a common description format makes the exchange of service dependency models across multiple platforms and their monitoring particularly difficult. We show how this problem can be addressed by a web based architecture for retrieving and handling dependency information from various heterogeneous managed resources. Specifying dependencies in an XML based notation facilitates the sharing of information among the heterogeneous systems involved in the monitoring process.