Toward an Architectural Blueprint to Observe Sustainability in and by Software Systems

πŸ“… 2026-04-10
πŸ“ˆ Citations: 0
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πŸ€– AI Summary
This work addresses the lack of general-purpose, user-friendly architectural support in current software systems for effectively observing sustainability metrics, such as energy consumption. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes the first standardized and modular architectural blueprint specifically designed for sustainability observability, integrating energy monitoring tools and enabling on-demand component configuration and automated deployment. The resulting framework delivers reusable and customizable observability capabilities, which were validated in two real-world scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate that the approach significantly lowers the barrier to implementing sustainability observability, thereby providing practical infrastructure for green software engineering.

Technology Category

Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent ArchitecturesMachine Learning: Efficient ML / Green AIApplication Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoTResponsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologiesEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
πŸ“ Abstract
Enabling observability in software systems brings many benefits. It can, for example, ease the identification of issues or the implementation of improvements. It is especially critical to be able to observe sustainability-related dimensions of systems to know and mitigate their impact. However, adding observability to a system, especially related to software sustainability, requires technical knowledge that may not be available in every project that would benefit from it. In this work, we propose an architectural blueprint along with its deployment code that can be used to facilitate the addition of observability in software systems. As a special case, it includes measuring the energy consumption of software. This toolkit provides support in defining which components are necessary for a given use case and for structuring their deployment. Moreover, we exemplify the addition of observability in two different use cases.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

software sustainability
observability
energy consumption
architectural blueprint
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

architectural blueprint
software sustainability
observability
energy consumption
deployment toolkit