Method and system for integrated and synchronized desktop monitoring/CB Dec2009 (01-Feb-2010)

Method and system for integrated and synchronized desktop monitoring/CB Dec2009

A sophisticated system is disclosed that can record what happens on the desktop and at the same time is able to monitor some system resources. This system will operate in the context of computer desktop. In this context it provides a variety of system monitors the user can use to inspect deeply the system behaviour at each moment of the desktop registration he performed during the use of his application. This application, in this way, is able to help the user effectively when he tries to perform the problem determination after a program failure or he tries to debug some unexpected behaviours.

Actually, for example, if a verification engineer get an application error during the execution of some test scenarios, often it's not easy to understand deeply the causes have generated the problem and how they interacted to produce the error. The proposed solution is to provide an automated system that is able to provide the user all the monitored systems data caught at all the moments he needs to inspect how they interacted before, during or after the error happened.

    The solution provides a system data collector mechanism able to let system data interaction to emerge easily. Building blocks of the proposed solution are:

· System Monitors: specific monitors that record the flow of values of some system parameters taken during the recording interval.The application creates a strong temporal link between all the monitors data and the desktop recording.

· Enhanced process monitors: processes are particular system resources often bounded during their execution to other resources. This kind of monitor can activate automatically monitors on system resources bounded to the process. For example it often happens that processes write files, so if an enhanced monitor is enabled it is able to activate all the monitors on that files. The same can be applied to other process properties such as directories, events, registry keys, ports etc.

· Desktop registration: the user activates the desktop registration to record each movement that happens inside the windows of the desktop. The main use of this registration is to synchronize the desktop changes with the changes that the system monitors will report. In this way will be easy to recognize which are the systems involved and how they interacted during some specific application scenario. This application ability is based on a sampling system of system resources.

· Sampling System: The user before starting record, has to set the sampling interval or polling interval, that we can call delta. Then when the recording phase starts, the application enables all the required monitors to record each change occurs during delta. So the user, during the replay, will be able to verify delta after delta all the changes...