The first step in enabling the management of distributed applications to end-user expectations is the accurate and timely monitoring of end-user metrics. Monitoring distributed applications encompasses a large and rapidly changing set of users, applications, types of measurements, and platforms. This heterogeneity and large scale imposes two key challenges in monitoring end-user metrics: expressiveness and scalability. We need toexpress the metrics and their scope (both in time and space). The large scale, diversity, and dynamic nature of the scope of the measurements make it hard to specify metrics in a manner such that they are easy to comprehend, extensible, and uniform. These same reasons also make it hard to gather the described metrics in a scalable and timely manner. In this work we present the Activity Monitoring Language (AML), for declaratively specifying metrics, and a run-time system that implements the concepts in AML. Together, they compose SoLOMon (Service Level Objective Monitor), a system for the dynamic specification and monitoring of end-user service levels and events relating to (distributed) applications. SoLOMon is expressive, scalable, and extensible. Expressiveness in SoLOMon is a result of AML, which makes the system programmable. SoLOMon's scalability is a result of reducing events and measurements as close to their physical source as is possible without the loss of accuracy. The instrumentation independent nature of SoLOMon makes it extensible.
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