Improving Configuration Troubleshooting with Dynamic Information Flow Analysis

Опубликовано 12 августа 2016, 0:15

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. 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.