Bridging the divide between software developers and operators using logs

There is a growing gap between the software development and operation worlds. Software developers rarely divulge development knowledge about the software to operators, while operators rarely communicate field knowledge to developers. To improve the quality and reduce the operational cost of large-scale software systems, bridging the gap between these two worlds is essential. This thesis proposes the use of logs as mechanism to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Logs are messages generated from statements inserted by developers in the source code and are often used by operators for monitoring the field operation of a system. However, the rich knowledge in logs has not yet been fully used because of their non-structured nature, their large scale, and the use of the ad hoc log analysis techniques. Through case studies on large commercial and open source systems, we plan to demonstrate the value of logs as a tool to support developers and operators.