An actor-based runtime monitoring system for web and desktop applications

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a runtime monitoring method for Actor-based programs and present a Scala module that realizes the proposed method. The primary characteristic of our method is that it supports asynchronous message-passing based on the Actor model. Besides, the module does not require specialized languages for describing application properties to be monitored. Once a developer incorporates the module in his/her application, it continuously checks whether the application satisfies certain properties described as Scala code and invokes mitigation code when it finds the violation of the properties. This paper also provides two non-trivial use cases to illustrate how the module can be seamlessly integrated into actual modern Scala applications. We also demonstrate the efficiency of the module using a set of benchmarks that resulted in only 8% of the experiments causing more than 5% runtime overhead.