DisViz: Visualizing real-world distributed system logs with space time diagrams

Abstract

This thesis aims to provide an intuitive debugging and learning tool for distributed systems that communicate by message passing. Understanding and debugging distributed systems can be challenging and slow to iterate on, so there is a need for tools that can speed up the time it takes to diagnose the root cause of a bug. There exists significant prior work in creating tools that can aid in the visualization and debugging of distributed system executions, such as the ShiViz log visualizer [13]. This work builds on top of these tools to provide more debugging information, handle large log files, and be easily instrumented in existing systems. We demonstrate using the tool to debug issues in an implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm [34].