Learning Patterns in Configuration

Large services depend on correct configuration to run efficiently and seamlessly. Checking such configuration for correctness is important because services use a large and continuously increasing number of configuration files and parameters. Yet, very few such tools exist because the permissible values for a configuration parameter are seldom specified or documented, existing at best as tribal knowledge among a few domain experts.

In this paper, we address the problem of configuration pattern mining: learning configuration rules from examples. Using program synthesis and a novel string profiling algorithm, we show that we can use file contents and histories of commits to learn patterns in configuration. We have built a tool called ConfMiner that implements configuration pattern mining and have evaluated it on four large repositories containing configuration for a large-scale enterprise service. Our evaluation shows that ConfMiner learns a large variety of configuration rules with high precision and is very useful in flagging anomalous configuration.