Runtime nondeterminism is a fact of life in modern database applications. Previous research has shown that nondeterminism can cause applications to intermittently crash, become unresponsive, or experience data corruption. We propose Adaptive Interventional Debugging (AID) for debugging such intermittent failures.<\/p>\n
AID combines existing statistical debugging, causal analysis, fault injection, and group testing techniques in a novel way to (1) pinpoint the root cause of an application\u2019s intermittent failure and (2) generate an explanation of how the root cause triggers the failure. AID works by first identifying a set of runtime behaviors (called predicates) that are strongly correlated to the failure. It then utilizes temporal properties of the predicates to (over)-approximate their causal relationships. Finally, it uses fault injection to execute a sequence of interventions on the predicates and discover their true causal relationships. This enables AID to identify the true root cause and its causal relationship to the failure. We theoretically analyze how fast AID can converge to the identification. We evaluate AID with six real-world applications that intermittently fail under specific inputs. In each case, AID was able to identify the root cause and explain how the root cause triggered the failure, much faster than group testing and more precisely than statistical debugging. We also evaluate AID with many synthetically generated applications with known root causes and confirm that the benefits also hold for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Runtime nondeterminism is a fact of life in modern database applications. Previous research has shown that nondeterminism can cause applications to intermittently crash, become unresponsive, or experience data corruption. We propose Adaptive Interventional Debugging (AID) for debugging such intermittent failures. AID combines existing statistical debugging, causal analysis, fault injection, and group testing techniques in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13563,13560],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-707611","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-data-platform-analytics","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2020-6-1","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"ACM","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/11\/aid.pdf","id":"707617","title":"aid","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":707617,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/11\/aid.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Anna Fariha","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Suman Nath","user_id":33753,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Suman Nath"},{"type":"text","value":"Alexandra Meliou","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[],"msr_project":[554055],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":554055,"post_title":"Torch","post_name":"torch","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2018-11-28 15:34:02","post_modified":"2022-12-02 14:18:51","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/torch\/","post_excerpt":"We aim to develop practical tools and techniques that can help cloud developers adequately debug, test, configure, and monitor their systems. The research spans all aspects of improving reliability and availability of large-scale cloud systems, including understanding various runtime failures in real cloud systems, developing practical static and dynamic analysis techniques to uncover hard-to-find bugs before production, root-causing failures, designing lightweight but effective runtime monitoring and failure prevention, etc. Tools and techniques developed in the…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/554055"}]}}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/707611"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/707611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":707662,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/707611\/revisions\/707662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-content-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-content-type?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-product-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-product-type?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-platform?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-download-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-download-source?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=707611"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=707611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}