SysMon – A framework for monitoring and measuring real-time properties

Sammanfattning: ABB SA Products designs and manufactures complex real-time systems. The real-time properties of the system are hard to measure and test especially in the long run, e.g.  monitoring a system for months out in the real environment. ABB have started developing their own tool called JobMon for monitoring timing requirements, but they needed to measure more properties than time and in a more dynamic way than JobMon is constructed today. The tool must be able to measure different kind of data and be able to be monitor as long as the system itself. This thesis first does a survey and evaluation on existing commercial tools and if there exists a tool that can be integrated to the system and fulfill all demands. Different trace recorders and system monitoring tools are presented with its properties and functions. The conclusion is that there is no such tool and the best solution is to design and develop a new tool. The result is SysMon, a dynamic generic framework for measuring any type of data within a real-time system. The main focus for measuring during this thesis is time measurements, but no limits or assumptions of data types are made, and during late steps of the development new types of measurements are integrated. SysMon can also handle limits for measurements and, if required, take pre-defined actions e.g. triggering a logging function and saving all information about the measurement that passed the limit. The new tool is integrated to the system and evaluated thoroughly. It is an important factor to not steal too much resource from the system itself, and therefore a measurement of the tool’s intrusiveness is evaluated.