As the complexity and criticality of software increase every year, so does the importance of run-time monitoring. Third-party monitoring, with limited knowledge of the monitored software, and best-effort monitoring, which keeps pace with the monitored software, are especially valuable, yet underexplored areas of run-time monitoring. Most existing monitoring frameworks do not support their combination because they either require access to the monitored code for instrumentation purposes or the

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... cessing of all observed events, or both. We present a middleware framework, VAMOS, for the run-time monitoring of software which is explicitly designed to support third-party and best-effort scenarios. The design goals of VAMOS are (i) efficiency (keeping pace at low overhead), (ii) flexibility (the ability to monitor black-box code through a variety of different event channels, and the connectability to monitors written in different specification languages), and (iii) ease-of-use. To achieve its goals, VAMOS combines aspects of event broker and event recognition systems with aspects of stream processing systems. We implemented a prototype toolchain for VAMOS and conducted experiments including a case study of monitoring for data races. The results indicate that VAMOS enables writing useful yet efficient monitors, is compatible with a variety of event sources and monitor specifications, and simplifies key aspects of setting up a monitoring system from scratch.