As the complexity and criticality of software increase every year, so does the importance of runtime monitoring. Third-party and best-effort monitoring are especially valuable, yet under-explored areas of runtime monitoring. In this context, third-party monitoring means monitoring with a limited knowledge of the monitored software (as it has been developed by a third party). Best-effort monitoring keeps pace with the monitored software at the cost of possibly imprecise verdicts when keeping up with the monitored software would not be feasible. Most existing monitoring frameworks do not support the combination of third-party and best-effort monitoring because they either require the full access to the monitored code or the ability to process all observable events, or both. We present a middleware framework, Vamos , for the runtime monitoring of software. Vamos is explicitly designed to support third-party and best-effort scenarios. The design goals of Vamos are (i) efficiency (tracing events with low overhead), (ii) flexibility (the ability to monitor a variety of different event channels, and to connect to a wide range of monitors), and (iii) ease-of-use. To achieve its goals, Vamos combines aspects of event broker and event recognition systems with aspects of stream processing systems. We implemented a prototype toolchain for Vamos and conducted a set of experiments demonstrating the usability of the scheme. The results indicate that Vamos enables writing useful yet efficient monitors, and simplifies key aspects of setting up a monitoring system from scratch.

Abstract As the complexity and criticality of software increase every year, so does the importance of run-time monitoring. Third-party monitoring, with limited knowledge of the monitored software, and best-effort monitoring, which keeps pace with the monitored software, are especially valuable, yet underexplored areas of run-time monitoring. Most existing monitoring frameworks do not support their combination because they either require access to the monitored code for instrumentation purposes or the processing of all observed events, or both. We present a middleware framework, Vamos, for the run-time monitoring of software which is explicitly designed to support third-party and best-effort scenarios. The design goals of Vamos are (i) efficiency (keeping pace at low overhead), (ii) flexibility (the ability to monitor black-box code through a variety of different event channels, and the connectability to monitors written in different specification languages), and (iii) ease-of-use. To achieve its goals, Vamos combines aspects of event broker and event recognition systems with aspects of stream processing systems. We implemented a prototype toolchain for Vamos and conducted experiments including a case study of monitoring for data races. The results indicate that Vamos enables writing useful yet efficient monitors, is compatible with a variety of event sources and monitor specifications, and simplifies key aspects of setting up a monitoring system from scratch.