How to mitigate the incident? an effective troubleshooting guide recommendation technique for online service systems
Abstract
In recent years, more and more traditional shrink-wrapped software is provided as 7x24 online services. Incidents (events that lead to service disruptions or outages) could affect service availability and cause great financial loss. Therefore, mitigating the incidents is important and time critical. In practice, a document describing a mitigation process, called a troubleshooting guide (TSG), is usually used to reduce the Time To Mitigate (TTM). To investigate the usage of TSGs in real-world online services, we conduct the first empirical study on 18 real-world, large-scale online service systems in Microsoft. We analyze the distribution and characteristics of TSGs among all incident records in the past two years. According to our study, 27.2% incidents have TSG records and 36.2% of them occurred at least twice. Besides, on average developers spend around 36.3% of the entire mitigation time on locating the desired TSGs.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Jiang-al:FSE20,
author = {Jiajun Jiang and
Weihai Lu and
Junjie Chen and
Qingwei Lin and
Pu Zhao and
Yu Kang and
Hongyu Zhang and
Yingfei Xiong and
Feng Gao and
Zhangwei Xu and
Yingnong Dang and
Dongmei Zhang},
title = {How to mitigate the incident? an effective troubleshooting guide recommendation technique for online service systems},
booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
pages = {1410--1420},
publisher = {{ACM}},
year = {2020},
}