A dynamic group management framework for large-scale distributed event monitoring

Distributed event monitoring is an important service for fault, performance and security management. Next generation event monitoring services are highly distributed and involve a large number of monitoring agents. In order to support scalable event monitoring, the monitoring agents use IP multicasting for disseminating events and control information. However, due to the dynamic nature of event detection and correlation in distributed monitoring, devising an efficient group management for agents organization and coordination becomes a challenging issue. This paper presents an adaptive group management framework that dynamically re-configures the group structures and membership assignments at run-time according to the event correlation requirements and allows for optimal delivery of multicast messages between the management entities. This framework provides techniques for solving agents' state synchronization, collision-free group allocation and agents bootstrap problems in distributed event monitoring. The presented framework has been implemented within a HiFi system which is a distributed hierarchical monitoring system.