Dynamic VM Dependability Monitoring Using Hypervisor Probes

Abstract

Many current VM monitoring approaches require guest OS modifications and are also unable to perform application level monitoring, reducing their value in a cloud setting. This paper introduces hprobes, a framework that allows one to dynamically monitor applications and operating systems inside a VM. The hprobe framework does not require any changes to the guest OS, which avoids the tight coupling of monitoring with its target. Furthermore, the monitors can be customized and enabled/disabled while the VM is running. To demonstrate the usefulness of this framework, we present three sample detectors: an emergency detector for a security vulnerability, an application watchdog, and an infinite-loop detector. We test our detectors on real applications and demonstrate that those detectors achieve an acceptable level of performance overhead with a high degree of flexibility.