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arXiv · 1606.05963

Debugging OpenStack Problems Using a State Graph Approach

Yong Xiang·Hu Li·Sen Wang·Wei Xu
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Abstract

It is hard to operate and debug systems like OpenStack that integrate many independently developed modules with multiple levels of abstractions. A major challenge is to navigate through the complex dependencies and relationships of the states in different modules or subsystems, to ensure the correctness and consistency of these states. We present a system that captures the runtime states and events from the entire OpenStack-Ceph stack, and automatically organizes these data into a graph that we call system operation state graph (SOSG).With SOSG we can use intuitive graph traversal techniques to solve problems like reasoning about the state of a virtual machine. Also, using graph-based anomaly detection, we can automatically discover hidden problems in OpenStack. We have a scalable implementation of SOSG, and evaluate the approach on a 125-node production OpenStack cluster, finding a number of interesting problems.

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Yong Xiang, Hu Li, Sen Wang, Wei Xu. 2016-06-20. Debugging OpenStack Problems Using a State Graph Approach. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05963

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