Analyze-NOW-an environment for collection and analysis of failures in a network of workstations

Thakur, A.; Iyer, Ravishankar K.

doi:10.1109/24.556579

Cited by 34 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Most of the previous work in measurement-based dependability evaluation was based on measurements made at either failure times [3,10,14] or at times an error was observed [11,15,20,21]. Chillarege et.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A methodology for detection and estimation of software aging

Garg

Moorsel

Vaidyanathan

et al.

Proceedings Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (Cat. No.98TB100257)

236

165

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The phenomenon of software aging refers to the accumulation of errors during the execution of the software which eventually results in it's crash/hang failure. A gradual performance degradation may also accompany software aging. Pro-active fault management techniques such as "Software rejuvenation" [9] may be used to counteract aging if it exists. In this paper, we propose a methodology for detection and estimation of aging in the UNIX operating system. First, we present the design and implementation of an SNMP based, distributed monitoring tool used to collect operating system resource usage and system activity data at regular intervals, from networked UNIX workstations. Statistical trend detection techniques are applied to this data to detect/validate the existence of aging. For quantifying the effect of aging in operating system resources, we propose a metric "Estimated time to exhaustion" which is calculated using well known slope estimation techniques. Although the distributed data collection tool is specific to UNIX, the statistical techniques can be used for detection and estimation of aging in other software as well.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A methodology for detection and estimation of software aging

Garg

Moorsel

Vaidyanathan

et al.

Proceedings Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (Cat. No.98TB100257)

236

165

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Whereas in [5] only time based trend detection and estimation of resource exhaustion are considered, we also take the system workload into account for building our model. Other previous work in measurement-based dependability evaluation is based on either measurements made at failure times [1,12,15] or at error observation times [13,23,24]. In our case, we need to monitor the system parameters continuously since we are interested in trend estimation and not in inter-failure times or identifying error patterns.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A measurement-based model for estimation of resource exhaustion in operational software systems

Vaidyanathan

Trivedi

Proceedings 10th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (Cat. No.PR00443)

136

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Software systems are known to suffer from outages due to transient errors. Recently, the phenomenon of "software aging" [5, 10], one in which the state of the software system degrades with time, has been reported. The primary causes of this degradation are the exhaustion of operating system resources, data corruption and numerical error accumulation. This may eventually lead to performance degradation of the software or crash/hang failure or both. Earlier work in this area to detect aging and to estimate its effect on system resources does not take into account the system workload [5]. In this paper, we propose a measurement-based model to estimate the rate of exhaustion of operating system resources both as a function of time and the system workload state. The semi-Markov reward model is constructed based on workload and resource usage data collected from the UNIX operating system. We first identify different workload states using statistical cluster analysis and build a state-space model. Corresponding to each resource, a reward function is then defined for the model based on the rate of resource exhaustion in the different states. The model is then solved to obtain trends and the estimated exhaustion rates and time to exhaustion for the resources. With the help of this measure, pro-active fault management techniques such as "Software rejuvenation" [10] may be employed to prevent unexpected outages.

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“…On the other hand, log-based techniques consist in analyzing the log files produced by the component, if available [11,12]. In fact, these may contain many useful data to comprehend the system dependability behavior, as shown by many studies on the field [13,14]. Moreover, logs are the only direct source of information available in the case of OTS items.…”

Section: Background and Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operating System Support to Detect Application Hangs

Carrozza

Cinque

Cotroneo

et al. 2008

Electronic Workshops in Computing

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On-line failure detection is an essential means to control and assess the dependability of complex and critical software systems. In such context, effective detection strategies are required, in order to minimize the possibility of catastrophic consequences. This objective is however difficult to achieve in complex systems, especially due to the several sources of non-determinism (e.g., multi-threading and distributed interaction) which may lead to software hangs, i.e., the system is active but no longer capable of delivering its services. The paper proposes a detection approach to uncover application hangs. It exploits multiple indirect data gathered at the operating system level to monitor the system and to trigger alarms if the observed behavior deviates from the expected one. By means of fault injection experiments conducted on a research prototype, it is shown how the combination of several operating system monitors actually leads to an high quality of detection, at an acceptable overhead.

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Analyze-NOW-an environment for collection and analysis of failures in a network of workstations

Cited by 34 publications

References 11 publications

A methodology for detection and estimation of software aging

A methodology for detection and estimation of software aging

A measurement-based model for estimation of resource exhaustion in operational software systems

Operating System Support to Detect Application Hangs

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