Online Reliability Monitoring: a Hybrid Approach

Assuring high reliability levels in complex software systems is difficult. The spread of component-based paradigm brought, along with many advantages, new thorny problems and challenges. Various approaches have been proposed to guarantee high reliability and cope with such problems – among these, proactive policies are particularly effective and inexpensive. The ability to monitor the system at runtime and to give online estimations about the trend of dependability attribute of interest, is the key to implement strategies aiming at forecasting, and thus proactively preventing, the system failure occurrence. In this paper, an online reliability monitoring approach is proposed. It combines benefits of architecture- based reliability model and dynamic analysis, so as to integrate static modeling power with representative operational data. Its usage is illustrated by a prototype implementation, a case-study and preliminary results.