Modeling Systems from Logs of their Behavior

  • Ivan Beschastnikh | University of British Columbia

Logged messages are invaluable for debugging and diagnosing problems. Unfortunately, many execution logs are inscrutable in their raw form. For example, a production Google system may generate a billion-line log file in a single day. In my talk, I will detail two log-analysis tools that I developed to deal with this problem. These tools infer concise and precise models from large execution logs of sequential and distributed systems. Both tools enable new kinds of program analyses and make logs more useful to developers. For example, my empirical experiments show that developers find the inferred models useful for identifying bugs, confirming bugs that were previously known, and increasing their confidence in their implementations.

Speaker Details

Ivan Beschastnikh is a final-year PhD student at the University of Washington working with Tom Anderson, Michael D. Ernst, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. His research aim is to improve the design, implementation, and operation of large systems by using techniques from the areas of systems and software engineering.

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks