{"id":187491,"date":"2012-03-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T10:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/improving-configuration-troubleshooting-with-dynamic-information-flow-analysis\/"},"modified":"2016-08-22T11:25:59","modified_gmt":"2016-08-22T18:25:59","slug":"improving-configuration-troubleshooting-with-dynamic-information-flow-analysis","status":"publish","type":"msr-video","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/video\/improving-configuration-troubleshooting-with-dynamic-information-flow-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving Configuration Troubleshooting with Dynamic Information Flow Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Complex software systems are difficult to configure and manage. When problems inevitably arise, operators spend considerable time troubleshooting those problems. Even for casual compute users, troubleshooting is often enormously frustrating. I focus specifically on configuration errors, in which the application code is correct, but the software has been configured incorrectly so that it does not behave as desired. For instance, a mistake in a configuration file may lead software to crash, produce undesired output, or run with degraded performance.<\/p>\n<p>In this talk, I show that system support for dynamic information flow analysis can substantially simplify and reduce the human effort needed to troubleshoot software systems. I present ConfAid, and X-ray, two diagnosis tools that use dynamic information flow analysis to identify the likely root cause of a configuration problem. ConfAid diagnoses configuration problems that lead to crashes, and undesired outcome; while X-ray focuses on diagnosing misconfigurations that cause performance problems. The output of these tools is an ordered list of the configuration tokens most likely to have caused the exhibited problem. I show that troubleshooting using information flow analysis only takes a few minutes to complete, which is much faster and far less labor-intensive compared to manual troubleshooting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Complex software systems are difficult to configure and manage. When problems inevitably arise, operators spend considerable time troubleshooting those problems. Even for casual compute users, troubleshooting is often enormously frustrating. I focus specifically on configuration errors, in which the application code is correct, but the software has been configured incorrectly so that it does not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":196719,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[],"msr-video-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-session-type":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"msr-episode":[],"msr-research-theme":[],"class_list":["post-187491","msr-video","type-msr-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/Buti990D3CM","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_video_file":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/187491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-video"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/187491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-video-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video-type?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-session-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-session-type?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-episode","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-episode?post=187491"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-theme?post=187491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}