WTM: A Traffic Monitoring Framework for Web Service Transactions

We propose in this paper an integrated approach that enables the management of Web service transactions. Compared to the existing Web management solutions, it targets to efficiently manage multi-tier Web transactions. It has one unique feature: While the monitoring of Web traffic is done at multiple levels: network, transport, application, and transaction layers, traffic associated with a multi-tier transaction can be correlated nonintrusively such that breakdown analysis can be realized from either service consumer or provider's perspective. A combination of sampling-based packet monitoring and packet probing is used to collect measurement data. A causal sampling protocol is designed to synchronize and correlate the capturing of the traffic associated with multi-tier Web transactions.