Automated problem determination using call-stack matching

Abstract

We present an architecture and algorithms for performing automated software problem determination using call-stack matching. In an environment where software is used by a large user community, the same problem may re-occur many times. We show that this can be detected by matching the program call-stack against a historical database of call-stacks, so that as soon as the problem has been resolved once, future cases of the same or similar problems can be automatically resolved. This would greatly reduce the number of cases that need to be dealt with by human support analysts. We also show how a call-stack matching algorithm can be automatically learned from a small sample of call-stacks labeled by human analysts, and examine the performance of this learning algorithm on two different data sets. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.