A Monitoring System for Distributed Edge Infrastructures with Decentralized Coordination

Abstract

We present the case of monitoring a decentralized and crowdsourced network infrastructure, that needs to be monitored over geographically distributed devices at the network edge. It is a characteristic of the target environment that both, the infrastructure to be monitored and the hosts where the monitoring system runs, change over time, and network partitions may happen. The proposed monitoring system is decentralized, and monitoring servers coordinate their actions through an eventually consistent data storage layer deployed at the network edge. We developed a proof-of-concept implementation, which leverages CRDT-based data types provided by AntidoteDB. Our evaluation focuses on the understanding of the continuously updated mapping of monitoring server to network devices, specifically on the effects of different policies for each individual monitoring server to decide on which and how many network devices to monitor. One of the policies is experimented by means of a deployment on 8 real nodes, leveraging the data replication of AntidoteDB in a realistic setting. The observed effects of the different policies are interpreted from the point of view of the trade-off between resource consumption and redundancy.