Detection and Diagnosis of Recurrent Faults in Software Systems by Invariant Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A correctly functioning enterprise-software system exhibits long-term, stable correlations between many of its monitoring metrics. Some of these correlations no longer hold when there is an error in the system, potentially enabling error detection and fault diagnosis. However, existing approaches are inefficient, requiring a large number of metrics to be monitored and ignoring the relative discriminative properties of different metric correlations. In enterprise-software systems, similar faults tend to reoccur. It is therefore possible to significantly improve existing correlation-analysis approaches by learning the effects of common recurrent faults on correlations. We present methods to determine the most significant correlations to track for efficient error detection, and the correlations that contribute the most to diagnosis accuracy. We apply machine learning to identify the relevant correlations, removing the need for manually configured correlation thresholds, as used in the prior approaches. We validate our work on a multi-tier enterprise-software system. We are able to detect and correctly diagnose 8 of 10 injected faults to within three possible causes, and to within two in 7 out of 8 cases. This compares favourably with the existing approaches whose diagnosis accuracy is 3 out of 10 to within 3 possible causes. We achieve a precision of at least 95%.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".