REVERSE ENGINEERING DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS: AN EVENT ABSTRACTION TOOL

Abstract

Understanding the behavior of distributed applications is a very challenging task due to the complexity of these applications. To manage complexity, the top-down use of suitable abstraction hierarchies is frequently proposed. Given the complexity of distributed applications, manually deriving such abstraction hierarchies is not realistic. The execution of distributed applications is typically analyzed using an event-based approach. This paper discusses one tool that groups more primitive events into abstract events to derive a hierarchy of abstract events automatically. Ideally, these abstractions should reveal logical units of an application and their relations. To explore the abstraction hierarchies derived, an existing prototype visualization tool was modified to provide abstract visualizations. A user can navigate through these abstraction hierarchies, displaying an execution at various levels of abstraction. Examples of such abstract visualizations are given and discussed. In general, the abstractions derived automatically represent meaningful parts of the application: they can be interpreted in terms of the application domain. While the abstraction tool does not necessarily derive the best possible abstraction hierarchies in all cases, it performs the bulk of the work and provides good initial abstractions which can subsequently be refined manually.