International Business Machines Corporation

David Ferguson Legler

Steven Gene Halverson

Walter H Schwane

Patrick Michael Wildt

Jay Paul Kurtz

Edwin C Grazier

John Michael Attinella

Larry J Cravens

Michael James Denney

William A Lynch

Ronald F Forman

Keith A Zblewski

Michael A Schlasner

Larry N Robel

A method utilizes a virtual flight recorder to harvest a subset of events being collected by an active system tracing facility during operation of a computer system. The virtual flight recorder is 'virtual' from the sense that it is not specifically instrumented into a component with which the virtual flight recorder is associated, which eliminates the burden on developers to specifically instrument components of interest, and minimizes the impact on system performance as a result of performance metric collection.

Virtual flight recorder hosted by system tracing facility

The preferred embodiment of the present invention provides system for data collection that provides a solution that can be easily extended to collect different data types. The preferred embodiment provides a collection repository that stores different collected data types with a single consistent interface for accessing the collected data. The preferred embodiment is a data collector implemented from an object-oriented framework. The object-oriented data collector can be easily extended by adding additional instances of the data collector from the framework. The preferred embodiment framework includes mechanisms for global customization of the collector and synchronization of the collection. The preferred embodiment also includes base probe classes that define the probes that perform the actual collection of the system data and store the data in a common collection repository. Subclasses are provided to implement the collection of different types of system data. Thus, the preferred embodiment provides an extensible and flexible solution to the problem of collecting and analyzing different types of system data.

Object-oriented framework for the generic collection of system data

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Rochester, MN, United States of America

David Ferguson Legler