The 'sysmon_handler' application

Authors: Scott Lystig Fritchie (scott@basho.com).

sysmon_handler is an Erlang/OTP application that manages the event messages that can be generated by the Erlang virtual machine's system_monitor BIF (Built-In Function). These messages can notify a central data-gathering process about the following events:

Processes that have their private heaps grow beyond a certain size.
Processes whose private heap garbage collection ops take too long
Ports that are busy, e.g., blocking file & socket I/O
Network distribution ports are busy, e.g., lots of communication with a slow peer Erlang node.

The problem with system_monitor events is that there isn't a mechanism within the Erlang virtual machine that limits the rate at which the events are generated. A busy VM can easily create many hundreds of these messages per second. Some kind of rate-limiting filter is required to avoid further overloading a system that may already be overloaded.

This app will use two processes for system_monitor message handling.

A gen_server process to provide a rate-limiting filter.
A gen_event server to allow flexible, user-defined functions to respond to system_monitor events that pass through the first stage filter.

The Erlang/OTP documentation clearly states that only one process can receive system_monitor messages. But using the sysmon_handler OTP app, if multiple parties are interested in receiving system_monitor events, each party can add an event handler to the sysmon_handler event handler.

Events sent to custom event handlers

The following events can be sent from the sysmon_handler filtering/rate-limiting process (a.k.a. sysmon_handler_filter) to the event handler process (a.k.a. sysmon_handler).

{monitor, pid(), atom(), term()} ... These are system_monitor messages as they are received verbatim by the sysmon_handler_filter process. See the reference documentation for erlang:system_monitor/2 for details.
{suppressed, proc_events | port_events, Num::integer()} ... These messages inform your event handler that Num events of a certain type (proc_events or port_events) were suppressed in the last second (i.e. their arrival rate exceeded the configured rate limit).

The event handler process in this application uses the registered name sysmon_handler. To add your handler, use something like: gen_event:add_sup_handler(sysmon_handler, yourModuleName, YourInitialArgs).

See gen_event:add_sup_handler/3 for API details. See the example event handler module in the source repository, src/sysmon_handler_example_handler.erl, for example usage.

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