Assessing and improving the effectiveness of logs for the analysis of software faults

Event logs are the primary source of data to characterize the dependability behavior of a computing system during the operational phase. However, they are inadequate to provide evidence of software faults, which are nowadays among the main causes of system outages. This paper proposes an approach based on software fault injection to assess the effectiveness of logs to keep track of software faults triggered in the field. Injection results are used to provide guidelines to improve the ability of logging mechanisms to report the effects of software faults. The benefits of the approach are shown by means of experimental results on three widely used software systems.