SONAR: Customizable, Lightweight Tool Support to Prevent Drowning in Diagnostics

Traditional system diagnostic and management techniques rely on static system structure and static instrumentation. We believe that static approaches are simply no longer sustainable in today’s complex, distributed and dynamic systems. SONAR (Sustainable Optimization and Navigation with Aspects at Runtime) is a fluid and unified framework that allows stakeholders to dynamically explore and modify meaningful entities that are otherwise spread across predefined abstraction boundaries. Through a combination of dynamic Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Java Management Extensions (JMX), SONAR can comprehensively coalesce scattered artifacts – enabling iterative and interactive system-wide investigation and control. This paper overviews the motivation, design and implementation of SONAR.