Event Logs for the Analysis of Software Failures: A Rule-Based Approach

Abstract

Event logs have been widely used over the last three decades to analyze the failure behavior of a variety of systems. Nevertheless, the implementation of the logging mechanism lacks a systematic approach and collected logs are often inaccurate at reporting software failures: This is a threat to the validity of log-based failure analysis. This paper analyzes the limitations of current logging mechanisms and proposes a rule-based approach to make logs effective to analyze software failures. The approach leverages artifacts produced at system design time and puts forth a set of rules to formalize the placement of the logging instructions within the source code. The validity of the approach, with respect to traditional logging mechanisms, is shown by means of around 12,500 software fault injection experiments into real-world systems

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“…This interval allows the VMs to stabilize after a reboot. 4 http://kernel.ubuntu.com/ ∼ cking/stress-ng/ Our experimental campaign parameters are summarized in Table II. …”

“…Although some works propose new methods to generate relevant log events as in [4], logfiles still gather a wide range of events and evaluating their information in the execution context or weighting their gravity is still intricate. For instance, the authors of [17] analyze a wide range of logs with engineers and compare events signaling failures to the engineers feedback on actual failures.…”

“…Also, different logfiles may gather information with distinct types of information. For instance rule-based logging [4] traces the start and the termination of applications functions, while syslog event logging collects system activity. Each of them tends to describe a partial view of the whole system.…”

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“…In addition to using log records and collecting data, we must also track the type of error that occurred to classify the problem, facilitate statistical analysis, and improve the reliability and stability of the system [4,[11][12][13][14]. As described in [4], we used their defined error types, shown in Table 1.…”

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“…These issues represent a serious threat when logs are used to analyze system failures [2], [3]. Unreported failures may lead to erroneous insights in the system behavior [17].…”