BEE is a portable platform for building distributed event environments to monitor and debug the performance of distributed heterogenous applications. An important feature is the dynamic connection of client programs to monitoring tools which facilitates flexible monitoring of network programs at runtime. It also supports user defined event classes which can be used by implementors to build complex event systems as well as by application programmers who need to write customized monitors.

BEE has been implemented for a variety of systems. One implementation based on a reliable message protocol is available on @c(Nectar), a network of workstations connected by optical fibers with a maximum throughput of 100 Mbit/sec. A TCP/IP based implementation has been ported to several machine architectures (Sun, Vax and Cray-YMP), supporting the instrumentation of C and Ada programs.
The paper describes BEE's architecture, portrays some of the problems encountered during the various ports of BEE and demonstrates the cost associated with distributed heterogenous event processing.