OSDI '04 Abstract
Pp. 245258 of the Proceedings
Automatic Misconfiguration Troubleshooting with PeerPressure
Helen J. Wang, John C. Platt, Yu Chen, Ruyun Zhang, and Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research
Abstract
Technical support contributes 17% of the total cost of ownership of
today's desktop PCs. An important element
of technical support is troubleshooting misconfigured applications.
Misconfiguration troubleshooting is particularly challenging, because
configuration information is shared and altered by multiple
applications.
In this paper, we present a novel troubleshooting system:
PeerPressure, which uses statistics from a set of sample machines
to diagnose the root-cause misconfigurations on a
sick machine. This is in contrast with methods that require manual
identification on a healthy machine for diagnosing
misconfigurations. The elimination of this manual
operation makes a significant step towards automated misconfiguration
troubleshooting.
In PeerPressure, we introduce a ranking metric for misconfiguration
candidates. This metric is based on empirical Bayesian estimation. We
have prototyped a PeerPressure troubleshooting system and used a database of
87 machine configuration snapshots to evaluate its performance. With 20
real-world troubleshooting cases, PeerPressure can effectively pinpoint the
root-cause misconfigurations for 12 of these cases. For the remaining cases,
PeerPressure significantly narrows down the number of root-cause candidates
by three orders of magnitude.
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