Development of a prototype framework for monitoring application events

Abstract: Software rarely comes without maintenance after it is released. There can be bugs not captured in development or performance that might not meet expectations; therefore, it is crucial to be able to collect data from running software, preemptively addressing such issues. A common way to monitor the general health of a system is by monitoring it through the users' perspective — so-called "black-box" monitoring. Making a more sophisticated analysis of software requires code that offers no functionality to the software, whose purpose is to create data about the software itself. A common way of creating such data is through logging. While logging can be used in the general case, alternatively, more specific solutions can offer an easier pipeline to work with; while not being suited for tasks such as root-cause analysis.This study briefly looks at four different frameworks, all having different approaches to collect and structure data. This study also covers the development of a proof-of-concept framework that creates structured events through logging — along with a SQL-server database to store the event data.