Towards a System Monitoring Modeling Language (SyMoLa)

Best practices in software development suggest that systems include monitoring functionalities, allowing verification, auditing, traceability of operations, and quick response to incidents. On the other hand, domain-specific modeling languages (DSML) have shown great utility by allowing them to portray knowledge at a high level of abstraction. Even the application of DSML transformation tools towards specific implementations considerably reduces development time and effort, optimizing resources to take advantage of them in improving the design of systems, without worrying about low-level details.In this paper, a domain-specific modeling language oriented to systems monitoring specification is proposed, with a focus on the generation of cloud platforms for monitoring services. For this, the monitoring needs of different areas and applications were considered, the relevant concepts were synthesized, everyday needs were unified and consolidated, allowing to generalize and provide the modeling language with sufficient expression capabilities for monitoring the most domains. The syntax and semantics modeling language was provided, defining the graphical components that allow expressing each of the monitoring needs, and specifying restrictions, contexts, and notations, respectively. This study aims to contribute to Industry 4.0, with a design tool to facilitate the development processes of system monitoring solutions. This language is oriented to the integration of data in system of systems, extending the scope of the monitoring towards the perspective of a third party (regulatory entity, audit or monitoring services in the cloud).