Using Hy+ for network management and distributed debugging

  • Authors:

  • Mariano P. Consens;Masum Z. Hasan;Alberto O. Mendelzon

  • Affiliations:

  • CSRI, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario;CSRI, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario;CSRI, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '93 Proceedings of the 1993 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research: software engineering - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Visualization

Abstract

A network manager managing a computer network or a programmer attempting to understand and debug a distributed program both must deal with large volumes of data. Visualization is widely believed to help in these and similar tasks. We contend that visualization is indeed useful, but only if accompanied of the following facilities: abstraction, filtering, and layout control. The Hy+ visualization system and GraphLog query language provide these facilities. They support not just a fixed way of visualizing data, but visualizations that can be specified and manipulated through declarative queries, like data are manipulated in a database. In this paper we show how the Hy+/GraphLog system can be used by network managers or distributed debuggers to meet their information manipulation and visualization goals.With the aid of this system, a network manager can specify network management functions as declarative data manipulation statements (GraphLog queries), for example, to define alerts. The manager can also filter network management information and control the layout and aspect of the resulting visualizations.In the same way, the Hy+/GraphLog system can be used for debugging of distributed and parallel applications by specifying normal or abnormal patterns that the programmer is looking for as declarative GraphLog queries and manipulating the resulting visualizations to understand the behavior of the program.