Networked Windows NT system field failure data analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a measurement-based dependability study of a Networked Windows NT system based on field data collected from NT System Logs from 503 servers running in a production environment over a four-month period. The event logs at hand contains only system reboot information. We study individual server failures and domain behavior in order to characterize failure behavior and explore error propagation between servers. The key observations from this study are: (1) system software and hardware failures are the two major contributors to the total system downtime (22% and 10%), (2) recovery from application software failures are usually quick, (3) in many cases, more than one reboots are required to recover from a failure, (4) the average availability of an individual server is over 99%,(5) there is a strong indication of error dependency or error propagation across the network, (6) most (58%) reboots are unclassified indicating the need for better logging techniques, (7) maintenance and configuration contribute to 24% of system downtime.

A Recovery-Oriented Approach for Software Fault Diagnosis in Complex Critical Systems

“…Software faults which manifest permanently, also known as Bohrbugs, are likely to fix and discover during the pre-operational phases of system life cycle (e.g., structured design, design review, quality assurance, unit, component and integration testing, alpha/beta test), as well as by means of traditional debugging techniques. Conversely, software faults which manifest transiently, also known as Heisenbugs, cannot be reproduced systematically (Huang, Jalote, & Kintala, 1994), and they have been demonstrated to be the major cause of failures in software systems, especially during the system operational phase (Sullivan & Chillarege, 1991;Chillarege, Biyani, & Rosenthal,1995;Xu, Kalbarczyc, & Iyer, 1999).…”