STRIDER: A Black-box, State-based Approach to Change and Configuration Management and Support

  • Authors:

  • Yi-Min Wang;Chad Verbowski;John Dunagan;Yu Chen;Helen J. Wang;Chun Yuan;Zheng Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research

  • Venue:
  • LISA '03 Proceedings of the 17th USENIX conference on System administration
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We describe a new approach, called Strider, to Change and Configuration Management and Support (CCMS). Strider is a black-box approach: without relying on specifications, it uses state differencing to identify potential causes of differing program behaviors, uses state tracing to identify actual, run-time state dependencies, and uses statistical behavior modeling for noise filtering. Strider is a state-based approach: instead of linking vague, high-level descriptions and symptoms to relevant actions, it models management and support problems in terms of individual, named pieces of low-level configuration state and provides precise mappings to user-friendly information through a computer genomics database. We use troubleshooting of configuration failures to demonstrate that the Strider approach reduces problem complexity by several orders of magnitude, making root cause analysis possible.