Triage: diagnosing production run failures at the user's site

Diagnosing production run failures is a challenging yet important task. Most previous work focuses on offsite diagnosis, i.e. development site diagnosis with the programmers present. This is insufficient for production-run failures as: (1) it is difficult to reproduce failures offsite for diagnosis; (2) offsite diagnosis cannot provide timely guidance for recovery or security purposes; (3) it is infeasible to provide a programmer to diagnose every production run failure; and (4) privacy concerns limit the release of information (e.g. coredumps) to programmers. To address production-run failures, we propose a system, called Triage, that automatically performs onsite software failure diagnosis at the very moment of failure. It provides a detailed diagnosis report, including the failure nature, triggering conditions, related code and variables, the fault propagation chain, and potential fixes. Triage achieves this by leveraging lightweight reexecution support to efficiently capture t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Joseph Tucek, Shan Lu, Chengdu Huang, Spiros Xanthos, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: Failure Diagnosis Protocol, Failure Diagnosis Technique, Operating System, Software Failure Diagnosis, SOSP 2007