ESTABLISHING CAUSALITY ORDER OF COMPUTER TRACE RECORDS

摘要

Techniques are described herein that are capable of establishing causality order of computer trace records. A computer trace record is information that indicates an event that occurs with regard to execution of a computer program. For instance, machines in a distributed computer system may generate such computer trace records as the machines execute the computer program. The computer trace records may be ordered in an aggregated trace to accurately reflect the causality order of the computer trace records. A causality order of computer trace records is a temporal sequence of the computer trace records in which each cause event is indicated to occur before each effect event that is caused by the cause event. A cause event is an event that causes an effect event. An effect event is an event that is caused by a cause event.

主权项

1. A processor-based system to establish an accurate causality order of a plurality of computer trace records, which correspond to a plurality of respective events that occur with regard to execution of a computer program, in an aggregated trace, the processor-based system comprising:
one or more processors; identification logic, implemented using at least one of the one or more processors, configured to identify one or more first records of the plurality of computer trace records to be one or more respective cause records, each cause record indicating a cause event that causes an effect event, the plurality of computer trace records including a plurality of subsets, each subset of the plurality of subsets including one or more computer trace records of the plurality of computer trace records that are included in a respective trace that is generated by a respective processing system of a plurality of distributed processing systems,
the identification logic further configured to identify one or more second records of the plurality of computer trace records to be one or more respective effect records, each effect record indicating an effect event that is caused by a cause event,the identification logic further configured to identify one or more third records of the plurality of computer trace records to be one or more respective normal records, each normal record indicating a normal event that is not a cause event and that is not an effect event; correlation logic, implemented using at least one of the one or more processors, configured to, in a non-runtime context of the processor-based system, correlate each cause record of the one or more cause records with each effect record of the one or more effect records that indicates an effect event that is caused by a cause event that is indicated by the respective cause record based on one or more criteria to establish the accurate causality order of the plurality of computer trace records; and generation logic, implemented using at least one of the one or more processors, configured to, in the non-runtime context of the processor-based system, generate the aggregated trace to include the plurality of computer trace records in accordance with the accurate causality order.