SERSCIS

After releasing initial Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Decision Support Tools (DSTs) to project partners in February 2010, QinetiQ then released a subsequent update in July 2010. This update replaced the example “push” notification of monitoring metrics with a subscription/”pull” method for monitoring metrics that retrieved messages from the main SERSCIS Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This integration allows SERSCIS-assisted operators to view the metrics associated with System Governance and System Composition components by retrieving run-time reports.

The monitoring framework itself has also been augmented, as well as being integrated with other testbed components. Within the “SERSCIS Monitoring Translator” there is now an additional sub-component that can be configured to calculate new metrics based on monitoring reports. For example, these calculations can be used to take a “request count” and a “success count” and determine a “success rate” without requiring the monitored component to report additional metrics. The “success rate” metric would then provide the operator with a simpler indicator of whether a service is failing to perform as required, instead of manually comparing the two source metrics.

In addition to the monitoring integration, and additional colour set has been added to the main DST application. The colour sets are provided to render entities in the DST in a way that highlights important information to the operator. This new colour set uses configurable thresholds on metric values to highlight in red any entity whose monitored metrics breach the threshold. This new colour set can be used in addition to the previous monitoring colour set, which used the criticality of the message to determine colours.

Finally, the Springboard source-agnostic data search tool has been updated to use the latest version of the OWL API and the HermiT reasoner. These updates allow Springboard to display a wider range of ontologies, as well as improving reasoning speed with HermiT’s ‘hypertableau’ implementation. The Springboard tool itself has also been extended with a new “Class view” for loaded models. This provides operators with a view to help understand the structure of the model that they are viewing, which may allow them to understand new ontologies or prompt their memory of less frequently used ontologies.

In conjunction with the release and integration of other components by other partners, the updated Decision Support components allow an operator to view the state of an operational system by integrating design-time architectures with run-time monitoring information. This run-time information can then be evaluated in light of the system design, the pre-assessed risks and the proposed mitigations to help the user determine the best course of action with improved situational awareness.