Paper Details

Reference:

Xu Zhao, Kirk Rodrigues, Yu Luo, Michael Stumm, Ding Yuan, and Yuanyuan Zhou,
"The game of twenty questions: Do you know where to log",
In Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS'17), Whistler, BC, Canada, May, 2017, pp. 125–131.

Download:

PDF

Abstract:

A production system's printed logs are often the only source of runtime information available for postmortem debugging, performance analysis and profiling, security auditing, and user behavior analytics. Therefore, the quality of this data is critically important. Recent work has attempted to enhance log quality by recording additional variable values, but logging statement placement, i.e., where to place a logging statement, which is the most challenging and fundamental problem for improving log quality, has not been adequately addressed so far. This position paper proposes we automate the placement of logging statements by measuring how much uncertainty, i.e., the expected number of possible execution code paths taken by the software, can be removed by adding a logging statement to a basic block. Guided by ideas from information theory, we describe a simple approach that automates logging statement placement. Preliminary results suggest that our algorithm can effectively cover, and further improve, the existing logging statement placements selected by developers. It can compute an optimal logging statement placement that disambiguates the entire function call path with only 0.218% of slowdown.

Keywords:

Logging, Distributed systems, Debugging,

Reference Info:

DOI: 10.1145/3102980
ISBN: 9781450350686
OCLC: 8876837487

BibTeX:

@inproceedings(Zhao-HotOS17,
    author = {Xu Zhao and Kirk Rodrigues and Yu Luo and Michael Stumm and Ding Yuan and Yuanyuan Zhou},
    title = {The game of twenty questions: {D}o you know where to log},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (\textbf{HotOS'17})},
    location = {Whistler, BC, Canada},
    month = {May},
    year = {2017},
    pages = {125-131},
    doi = {10.1145/3102980},
    isbn = {9781450350686},
    keywords = {Logging, Distributed systems, Debugging,}
)