Information and control in gray-box systems
SOSP '01 Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Performance debugging for distributed systems of black boxes
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
WAP5: black-box performance debugging for wide-area systems
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
Democratizing content publication with coral
NSDI'04 Proceedings of the 1st conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 1
Using magpie for request extraction and workload modelling
OSDI'04 Proceedings of the 6th conference on Symposium on Opearting Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 6
Dynamic application-layer protocol analysis for network intrusion detection
USENIX-SS'06 Proceedings of the 15th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 15
Towards highly reliable enterprise network services via inference of multi-level dependencies
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Tracking in a spaghetti bowl: monitoring transactions using footprints
SIGMETRICS '08 Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Automating network application dependency discovery: experiences, limitations, and new solutions
OSDI'08 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
SALSA: analyzing logs as state machines
WASL'08 Proceedings of the First USENIX conference on Analysis of system logs
X-trace: a pervasive network tracing framework
NSDI'07 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Networked systems design & implementation
High speed and robust event correlation
IEEE Communications Magazine
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The ability to trace request execution paths is critical for diagnosing performance faults in large-scale distributed systems. Previous black-box and white-box approaches are either inaccurate or invasive. We present a novel semantics-assisted gray-box tracing approach, called Rake, which can accurately trace individual request by observing network traffic. Rake infers the causality between messages by identifying polymorphic IDs in messages according to application semantics. To make Rake universally applicable, we design a Rake language so that users can easily describe necessary semantics of their applications while reusing the core Rake component. We evaluate Rake using a few popular distributed applications, including web search, distributed computing cluster, content provider network, and online chatting. Our results demonstrate Rake is much more accurate than the black-box approaches while requiring no modification to OS/applications. In the CoralCDN (a content distributed network) experiments, Rake links messages with much higher accuracy than WAP5, a state-of-the-art blackbox approach. In the Hadoop (a distributed computing cluster platform) experiments, Rake helps reveal several previously unknown issues that may lead to performance degradation, including a RPC (Remote Procedure Call) abusing problem.