Flexible resource management and scheduling policies require detailed system-state information. Traditional, monolithic operating systems with a centralized kernel derive the required information directly, by inspection of internal data structures or maintaining additional accounting data. In systems with distributed or multi-level resource managers that reside in different subsystems and protection domains, direct inspection is unfeasible.

In this paper we present how system event logging - a mechanism usually used in the context of performance analysis and debugging - can also be used for resource scheduling. Event logs provide accumulated, preprocessed, and structured state information independent of the internal structure of individual system components or applications. We describe methods of low-overhead data collection and data analysis and present a prototypical application to multiprocessor scheduling of virtual machines.