The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
One of the problems in building distributed systems is figuring out what the heck is going on. Usually endless streams of log files are consulted like ancients using entrails to divine the will of the Gods.
To rise above these ancient practices we must rise another level of abstraction and that's the approach described in a Microsoft research paper: G2: A Graph Processing System for Diagnosing Distributed Systems, which uses execution graphs that model runtime events and their correlations in distributed systems.
The problem with these schemes is viewing applications, written by programmers in low level code, as execution graphs. But we're heading in this direction in any case. To program a warehouse or an internet sized computer we'll have to write at higher levels of abstraction so code can be executed transparently at runtime on these giant distributed computers. There are many advantages to this approach, fault diagnosis and performance monitoring are just one of the wins.
Abstract from the paper:
Return to Article