Inferring networked system models from behavior traces

Abstract

Networked systems are often difficult to debug and understand. A common way of gaining insight into system behavior is to inspect execution logs and documentation. Unfortunately, manual log inspection is difficult and documentation is often incomplete and out of sync with the implementation.To provide developers with more insight into networked systems I am working Dynoptic, a tool that infers a concise and accurate system model, in the form of a communicating finite state machine [5] from logs. Developers can use the inferred models to understand behavior, detect anomalies, verify known bugs, diagnose new bugs, and increase their confidence in the correctness of their implementation. Unlike most related work, Dynoptic does not require developerwritten scenarios, specifications, negative execution examples, or other complex input. Dynoptic processes the logs most systems already produce and requires developers only to specify a set of regular expressions for parsing the logs.