Title
How to mitigate the incident? an effective troubleshooting guide recommendation technique for online service systems
Abstract
In recent years, more and more traditional shrink-wrapped software is provided as 7x24 online services. Incidents (events that lead to service disruptions or outages) could affect service availability and cause great financial loss. Therefore, mitigating the incidents is important and time critical. In practice, a document describing a mitigation process, called a troubleshooting guide (TSG), is usually used to reduce the Time To Mitigate (TTM). To investigate the usage of TSGs in real-world online services, we conduct the first empirical study on 18 real-world, large-scale online service systems in Microsoft. We analyze the distribution and characteristics of TSGs among all incident records in the past two years. According to our study, 27.2% incidents have TSG records and 36.2% of them occurred at least twice. Besides, on average developers spend around 36.3% of the entire mitigation time on locating the desired TSGs. Our study shows that incidents could occur repeatedly and TSGs could be reused to facilitate incident mitigation. Motivated by our empirical study, we propose an automated TSG recommendation approach, DeepRmd, by leveraging the textual similarity between incident description and its corresponding TSG using deep learning techniques. We evaluate the effectiveness of DeepRmd on 18 online service systems. The results show that DeepRmd can recommend the correct TSG as the Top 1 returned result for 80.3% incidents, which significantly outperforms two baseline approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3368089.3417054
ESEC/FSE '20: 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering Virtual Event USA November, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-7043-1
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
23
12
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiajun Jiang162.44
Weihai Lu220.70
Junjie Chen38314.71
Qingwei Lin428527.76
Pu Zhao587.23
Yu Kang6103.24
Hongyu Zhang786450.03
Yingfei Xiong8105355.12
feng gao95317.81
Zhangwei Xu10112.59
Yingnong Dang1153726.92
Dongmei Zhang121439132.94