Mobile agent technology has become an important approach for the design and development of distributed systems. However, there is little research regarding the monitoring of computer resources and usage at large scale distributed computer centers. This paper presents a mobile agent-based system called the Mobile Agent Based Computer Monitoring System (MABCMS) that supports the dynamic sending and executing of control command, dynamic data exchange, and dynamic deployment of mobile code in C/C++. Based on the Mobile-C library, agents can call low level functions in binary dynamic or static libraries, and thus can monitor computer resources and usage conveniently and efficiently. Two experimental applications have been designed using the MABCMS. The experiments were conducted in a university computer center with hundreds of computer workstations and 15 server machines. The first experiment uses the MABCMS to detect improper usage of the computer workstations, such as playing computer games. The second experimental application uses the MABCMS to detect system resources such as available hard disk space. The experiments show that the mobile agent based monitoring system is an effective method for detecting and interacting with students playing computer games and a practical way to monitor computer resources in large scale distributed computer centers.
Robustness and security in a mobile-agent based network monitoring system