A taxonomy and catalog of runtime software-fault monitoring tools

A goal of runtime software-fault monitoring is to observe software behavior to determine whether it complies with its intended behavior. Monitoring allows one to analyze and recover from detected faults, providing additional defense against catastrophic failure. Although runtime monitoring has been in use for over 30 years, there is renewed interest in its application to fault detection and recovery, largely because of the increasing complexity and ubiquitous nature of software systems. We present taxonomy that developers and researchers can use to analyze and differentiate recent developments in runtime software fault-monitoring approaches. The taxonomy categorizes the various runtime monitoring research by classifying the elements that are considered essential for building a monitoring system, i.e., the specification language used to define properties; the monitoring mechanism that oversees the program's execution; and the event handler that captures and communicates monitoring results. After describing the taxonomy, the paper presents the classification of the software-fault monitoring systems described in the literature.

1 Introduction

Runtime software monitoring has been used for profiling, performance analysis, software optimization as well as software fault-detection, diagnosis, and recovery. Software-fault detection provides evidence that program behavior complies or does not comply with specified properties during program execution. While other verification techniques, such as testing, model checking, and theorem proving, aim to ensure universal correctness of programs, the intention of runtime software-fault monitoring is to determine whether the current execution preserves specified properties; thus, monitoring can be used to provide additional defense against catastrophic failure and to support testing by exposing state information. The increasing complexity and ubiquitous nature of software systems and the cost and inadequacy of testing [64] has sparked renewed interest in the field.