SALSA: analyzing logs as state machines

Abstract

SALSA examines system logs to derive state-machine views of the sytem’s execution, along with controlflow, data-flow models and related statistics. Exploiting SALSA’s derived views and statistics, we can effectively construct higher-level useful analyses. We demonstrate SALSA’s approach by analyzing system logs generated in a Hadoop cluster, and then illustrate SALSA’s value by developing visualization and failure-diagnosis techniques, for three different Hadoop workloads, based on our derived state-machine views and statistics. 1