Collecting and Querying Distributed Traces of Composite Service Executions

The development of new Web services by composition of existing ones is becoming a widespread approach to realise business-to-business collaborations. The composite services obtained in this way are then eventually used in other compositions. Given the dynamic nature of the Web, this recursive composition of services rapidly leads to intricate dependencies between them. On the other hand, businesses need to track the executions of their composite services in order to ensure explainability in case of failure and to support decision making. This paper deals with the issue of tracing composite service executions over the Web. It describes a model and an XML representation of service execution traces, an approach for collecting and storing these traces in a distributed environment, and an approach to evaluate queries over distributed repositories of traces.