Automatic Misconfiguration Troubleshooting with PeerPressure

Technical support contributes 17% of the total cost of ownership of today's desktop PCs [25]. An important element of technical support is troubleshooting misconfigured applications. Misconfiguration troubleshooting is particularly challenging, because configuration information is shared and altered by multiple applications. In this paper, we present a novel troubleshooting system: PeerPressure, which uses statistics from a set of sample machines to diagnose the root-cause misconfigurations on a sick machine. This is in contrast with methods that require manual identification on a healthy machine for diagnosing misconfigurations [30]. The elimination of this manual operation makes a significant step towards automated misconfiguration troubleshooting. In PeerPressure, we introduce a ranking metric for misconfiguration candidates. This metric is based on empirical Bayesian estimation. We have prototyped a PeerPressure troubleshootingsystem and used a database of 87 machine configur...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Helen J. Wang, John C. Platt, Yu Chen, Ruyun Zhang, Yi-Min Wang
• Keywords: Misconfiguration Candidates, Misconfiguration Troubleshooting, Operating System, OSDI 2004, Real-world Troubleshooting Cases