Title
Small Logs for Transactional Services: Distinction is Much More Accurate than (Positive) Discrimination
Abstract
For complex services, logging is an integral part of many middleware aspects, especially, transactions and monitoring. In the event of a failure, the log allows us to deduce the cause of failure (diagnosis), recover by compensating the logged actions (atomicity), etc. However, for heterogeneous services, logging all the actions is often impracticable due to privacy/security constraints. Also, logging is expensive in terms of both time and space. Thus, we are interested in determining a small number of actions that needs to be logged, to know with certainty the actual sequence of executed actions from any given partial log. We propose two heuristics to determine such a small set of transitions, with services modeled as Finite State Machines. The first one is based on {\em (Positive) Discrimination} of transitions, using every observation to know (discriminate) that a maximal number of transitions occurred. We characterize it algebraically, giving a very fast algorithm. The second algorithm, the {\em distinguishing} algorithm, uses every observation to maximize the number of transitions which are ensured {\em not to} have occurred. We show experimentally that the second algorithm gives much more accurate results than the first one, although it is also slower (but still fast enough).
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/HASE.2008.24
HASE
Keywords
Field
DocType
maximal number,small set,complex service,partial log,transactional services,small logs,fast algorithm,actual sequence,finite state machines,accurate result,small number,em distinguishing,software fault tolerance,web service,system monitoring,transaction processing,bismuth,finite state machine,middleware,copper,computed tomography,observability,logging,service model,current transformers,data privacy,web services
Transaction processing,Atomicity,Small number,Computer science,System monitoring,Finite-state machine,Real-time computing,Heuristics,Information privacy,Small set,Reliability engineering
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1530-2059
6
0.50
References 
Authors
8
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Debmalya Biswas110613.43
Thomas Gazagnaire221513.32
Blaise Genest330425.09