• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.484-498
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• 2004

In this paper. we propose a novel performance monitoring scheme for heterogeneous SOAP nodes. The scheme is basically based on two-level (kernel-level and user-level) packet filtering of TCP flows. By TCP flow, we mean a sequence of raw packet streams on a TCP transaction. In this scheme, we detect and extract SOAP operations embedded in SOAP messages from TCP flows. Therefore, it becomes possible to monitor heterogeneous SOAP nodes deployed on diverse SOAP-based middlewares such as .Net and Apache AXIS. We present two implementation mechanisms for the proposed scheme. The first mechanism tries to identify SOAP operations by analyzing all fragmented SOAP messages on TCP flows. However, a naive policy would incur untolerable overhead since it needs to copy all packets from kernel to user space. The second mechanism overcomes this problem by selectively copying packets from kernel to user space. For selective copying, we use a kernel-level packet filtering method that makes use of some representative TCP flags.(e.g. SIN, FIN and PSH). In this mechanism, we can detect SOAP operations only from the last fragment of SOAP messages in most cases. Finally, we implement a SOAP monitoring system using a component ca]led SOAP Sniffer that realizes our proposed scheme, and show experimental results. We strongly believe that our system will play a vital role as a tool for various services such as transaction monitoring and load balancing among heterogeneous SOAP nodes.