Monitoring the resources of distributed systems is essential to the successful deployment and execution of grid applications, particularly when such applications have well-defined QoS requirements. The dproc system-level monitoring mechanisms implemented for standard Linux kernels have several key components. First, utilizing the familiar/proc filesystem, dproc extends this interface with resource information collected from both local and remote hosts. Second, to predictably capture and distribute monitoring information, dproc uses a kernel-level group communication facility, termed KECho, which is based on events and event channels. Third and the focus of this paper is dproc's run-time customizability for resource monitoring, which includes the generation and deployment of monitoring functionality within remote operating system kernels. Using dproc, we show that: (a) data streams can be customized according to a client's resource availabilities (dynamic stream management); (b) by dynamically varying distributed monitoring (dynamic filtering of monitoring information), appropriate balance can be maintained between monitoring overheads and application quality; and (c) by performing monitoring at kernel-level, the information captured enables decision making that takes into account the multiple resources used by applications.
