Discourse, Incomplete, Indirect, Linked, Marked
Explore key patterns in software trace and log analysis including implementation discourse, incomplete histories, indirect and linked messages, and marked messages. Understand how these patterns help identify anomalies, missing information, and connections within software logs for effective troubleshooting and debugging.
We'll cover the following...
Implementation discourse
If we look at any non-trivial trace, we see different implementation discourses. Components are written in various languages and adhere to different runtime environments, binary models, and interface frameworks. All these implementation variations influence the structure, syntax, and semantics of trace messages. For example, .NET debugging traces differ from file system driver or COM debugging messages. For this reason, we establish the new field of software trace linguistics as a science of software trace languages. Some parallels can be drawn here with software linguistics (the science of software languages).
Incomplete history
Typical software narrative history consists of requests and responses, such as function or object method calls and returns.
The code that generates execution history is response-complete if it traces both requests and responses. For such code (except in cases where tracing is stopped before a response), the absence of expected reactions could be a sign of blocked threads or quiet ...