Adjoint, Anchor, Causal Chains, History, Messages
Explore key patterns for effective software trace and log analysis. Understand the concept of adjoint messages, how to partition long traces using anchor messages, and interpret causal chains and histories to diagnose software behavior efficiently.
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Adjoint message
From analogy with adjoint thread of activity, we introduce the adjoint message analysis pattern. Most, if not all, analysis patterns focus on log message text and consider TIDs, PIDs, modules, source files, and functions as their attributes. However, we can choose one of the attributes and consider it as a message in its own right while the original message text can be thought of as another attribute. Then, we can analyze the structure of the trace from the perspective of that newly selected message.
Since the number of different message values now is smaller (for example, module names) compared to normal trace messages, we can use them in protein-like encoding and structure analysis schemes. We metaphorically name adjoint messages as amino-acid-messages (A-Messages ...