Automatic Software Fault Diagnosis by Exploiting Application Signatures

Application problem diagnosis in complex enterprise environments is a challenging problem, and contributes significantly to the growth in IT management costs. While application problems have a large number of possible causes, failures due to runtime interactions with the system environment (e.g., configuration files, resource limitations, access permissions) are one of the most common categories. Troubleshooting these problems requires extensive experience and time, and is very difficult to automate. In this paper, we propose a black-box approach that can automatically diagnose several classes of application faults using applications' runtime behaviors. These behaviors along with various system states are combined to create signatures that serve as a baseline of normal behavior. When an application fails, the faulty behavior is analyzed against the signature to identify deviations from expected behavior and likely cause. We implement a diagnostic tool based on this approach and d...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LISA
• Authors: Xiaoning Ding, Hai Huang, Yaoping Ruan, Anees Shaikh, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Application Problem Diagnosis, Application Problems, Complex Enterprise Environments, LISA 2008, Operating System