Diagnosing missing events in distributed systems with negative provenance

Abstract

When debugging a distributed system, it is sometimes necessary to explain the absence of an event - for instance, why a certain route is not available, or why a certain packet did not arrive. Existing debuggers offer some support for explaining the presence of events, usually by providing the equivalent of a backtrace in conventional debuggers, but they are not very good at answering 'Why not?' questions: there is simply no starting point for a possible backtrace.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 17, 2014
Source ID
10.1145/2740070.2626335

Entities

People

  • Andreas Haeberlen
  • Boon Thau Loo
  • Mingchen Zhao
  • Wenchao Zhou
  • Yang Wu

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Division of Computer and Network Systems
  • Georgetown University
  • University of Pennsylvania

Tags

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Educational Psychology
  • Rocket Propulsion.