A state machine approach for problem detection in large-scale distributed system

Abstract

Efficient problem detection methods play an important role in system management. In this paper, a formal method is described for problem detection in large scale and distributed enterprise IT environment. Events from distributed system components are collected, filtered and correlated. Leveraging these correlated events, the behavior of a distributed system is presented as a Problem Detection State Machine (PDSM). PDSM is built up automatically from system logs without any specification of the target system. This approach combines logs from multi-sources and does not require any human involved or experimental instructions. It is generally applicable to a large class of distributed systems. Experimental results show that the implementation of PDSM performs problem detection efficiently in typical distributed enterprise systems. ©2008 IEEE.