Visualizing Distributed State

Developing and maintaining distributed systems is a difficult task due to the inherent complexity of concurrency and non-determinism. These factors complicate our comprehension of how a distributed system behaves. Developers lack a range of tools to provide insight about the state of a system during its execution. This lack of insight makes triaging bugs an arduous task because it creates the need to manually inspect multiple, dispersed server logs. Visualization is useful for quickly articulating information. Dviz is a visualization tool for distributed systems. Dviz uses logs of state and time to generate an approximate FSM mined from a system execution. FSM states are generated by differentiating the state and plotting these states on a plane. This provides a clustering of similar states. FSM states are also linked via a time curve which connects all of the states linearly. Users inspect states by examining concrete variable values at individual points along the curve. This implementation only approximates an FSM and does not provide a query interface for the rich data, such as data invariants which are readily available. We propose that Dviz’s utility can be greatly improved upon by adding a flexible query language and by partitioning the time curve into a labeled FSM. These extensions to DViz facilitate user interaction and aggregate time curve information in a meaningful way.