Title: Modelling and Performance Evaluation of the Network and Service Management Plane
Author: Abdelkader Lahmadi
e-mail: lahmadi@loria.fr
Partner: INRIA
Supervisor: Olivier Festor
Committee:
Year of start: 2004
Year of end: 2007
Funding institution: INRIA

The objective of my thesis is to provide common performance metrics to evaluate the performance and the cost of management frameworks using measurement and analytical techniques for a somewhat unrealistic and realistic management scenarios.
We have focused our performance evaluation studies on the JMX (Java Management eXtensions) framework.

The main results of my thesis are so far:

• The development of a benchmarking platform dedicated to JMX management paradigms, nevertheless it is flexible and modular enough to be extended to other management frameworks such as SNMP.
• Based on the developed benchmarking platform, we have elaborated a delay model for the manager-agent model. Our finding is that management delays behavior follow closely a normal distribution with a small number of agents, and becomes more heavy tailed and approximates a Weibull distribution with an considerable number of agents. The delays scaling behavior is interesting because we can quantify the temporal accuracy of management data collected by a manager to a somewhat {\it maximum acceptable delay} that is considered as quality metric for time constrained monitoring system.
• We studied the impact of JMX activities on the performance of a managed J2EE. We have identified analytical formulate to quantify this impact that put in relation three main categories of performance metrics: data access, cost and quality. The results have implications for network, as well as for services and applications management.
• We have also elaborated analytical models for management systems performance evaluation from theoretical concerns regarding queueing models. The developed models are sufficiently general to capture management frameworks performance and provide a check on measurement results.

1. Modeling and Performance Evaluation of the Network and Service Management Plane, Lahmadi A., Andrey L., Festor O., Inter-Domain Management, First International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security Oslo Norvège 21/06/2007.
2. On the Impact of Management Instrumentation Models on Web Server Performance: A JMX Case Study, Lahmadi A., Festor O., Andrey L., Inter-Domain Management, First International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security Oslo Norvège 21/06/2007.
3. On Delays in Management Frameworks: Metrics, Models and Analysis, Andrey L., Lahmadi A., Festor O., 17th IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations and Management - DSOM 2006 Dublin/Ireland 22/10/2006.
4. On the Impact of Management on the Performance of a Managed System: A JMX-Based Management Case Study, Lahmadi A., Andrey L., Festor O., 16th IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations and Management - Management of Ambient Networks - DSOM 2005 Barcelona/Spain 24/10/2005.