Monitoring finite state properties: Algorithmic approaches and their relative strengths

Abstract

Monitoring complex applications to detect violations from specified properties is a promising field that has seen the development of many novel techniques and tools in the last decade. In spite of this effort, limiting, understanding, and predicting the cost of monitoring has been a challenge. Existing techniques primarily target the overhead caused by the large number of monitor instances to be maintained and the large number of events generated by the program that are related to the property. However, other factors, in particular, the algorithm used to process the sequence of events can significantly influence runtime overhead. In this work, we describe three basic algorithmic approaches to finite state monitoring and distill some of their relative strengths by conducting preliminary studies. The results of the studies reveal non-trivial differences in runtime overhead when using different monitoring algorithms that can inform future work. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.