Capturing Request Execution Path for Understanding Service Behavior and Detecting Anomalies Without Code Instrumentation

Abstract

With the increasing scale and complexity of cloud platforms and big-data analytics platforms, it is becoming more and more challenging to understand and diagnose the processing of a service request across multi-layer software stacks of such platforms. One way that helps to deal with this problem is to accurately capture the complete end-to-end execution path of service requests among all involved components. This paper presents REPTrace, a generic methodology for capturing such execution paths in a transparent fashion. Moreover, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of REPTrace by presenting how REPTrace can be leveraged for knowledge extraction and anomaly detection on the platforms’ request processing. Our experimental results show that, REPTrace enables capturing a holistic view of the request processing across multiple layers of the platforms (which is missing in official documentation) and discovering important undocumented features of the platforms. Fault injection experiments show execution anomalies are detected with 93% precision and 96% recall with aid of REPTrace.