Fault Analysis and Debugging of Microservice Systems: Industrial Survey, Benchmark System, and Empirical Study

By Xiaoping Zhou, Xin Peng, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Chao Ji, Wenhai Li, Dan Ding. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2018

355 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The complexity and dynamism of microservice systems pose unique challenges to a variety of software engineering tasks such as fault analysis and debugging. In spite of the prevalence and importance of microservices in industry, there is limited research on the fault analysis and debugging of microservice systems. To fill this gap, we conduct an industrial survey to learn typical faults of microservice systems, current practice of debugging, and the challenges faced by developers in practice. We then develop a medium-size benchmark microservice system (being the largest and most complex open source microservice system within our knowledge) and replicate 22 industrial fault cases on it. Based on the benchmark system and the replicated fault cases, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the effectiveness of existing industrial debugging practices and whether they can be further improved by introducing the state-of-the-art tracing and visualization techniques for distributed systems. The results show that the current industrial practices of microservice debugging can be improved by employing proper tracing and visualization techniques and strategies. Our findings also suggest that there is a strong need for more intelligent trace analysis and visualization, e.g., by combining trace visualization and improved fault localization, and employing data-driven and learning-based recommendation for guided visual exploration and comparison of traces.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems, Software

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b0847d1c1706c116bf030eb1780be94c34e137c

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Citations in the corpus

FIRM: An Intelligent Fine-Grained Resource Management Framework for SLO-Oriented Microservices (2020, methodology): “Train-Ticket Booking Service provides typical train-ticket booking functionalities, such as ticket inquiry, reservation, payment, change, and user notification.”
A Survey on Automated Log Analysis for Reliability Engineering (2020, methodology): “gnificantly facilitated by logs. In addition, they appealed to engineers to employ automated method to speedup the problem resolution time, which is also the focus of this survey. Likewise, Zhou etal.[163] empirically investigated the faults and debugging practices in microservice systems. The resul”