InfoSpect: Using a Logic Language for System Health Monitoring in Distributed Systems

Dependable systems cannot be built without a monitoring and management component. In this paper we propose using a wide variety of information gathering tools coupled with custom scripts and a Prolog language engine to aggregate information from multiple sources. Complex queries, difficult to express in standard database languages, can then be used to answer questions about the system (e.g. the health of individual components) or to discover contradictions (e.g. inconsistent configurations). We describe our prototype implementation and present some early results.