Details

• Date: November 10th, 2019
• Conference: 29th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2019)
• Location: Metropark Hotel Mongkok, Hong Kong, China

ICECCS is an A-ranked international conference by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) 2018 ranking.

Context

Event logs and event streams can be found in software systems of very diverse kinds. For instance, workflow management systems and ERP platforms produce event logs in some common format based on XML. Financial transaction systems also keep a log of their operations in some standardized and documented format, as is the case for web servers such as Apache and Microsoft IIS. Network monitors also receive streams of packets whose various headers and fields can be analyzed. Recently, even the world of video games has seen an increasing trend towards the logging of players’ realtime activities. In other words, most of today's complex systems produce a trace of their execution, whose content ---and value--- is often overlooked.

Analyzing the wealth of information contained in these logs can serve multiple purposes. Business process logs can be used to reconstruct a workflow based on a sample of its possible executions; financial database logs can be audited for compliance to regulations; suspicious or malicious activity can be detected by studying patterns in network or server logs. However, the available tools to process logs or streams of events are often large systems that are hard to setup, and even simple examples seem needlessly complicated.

Tutorial contents

In this tutorial, the audience will learn about BeepBeep, a versatile Java library intended to make the processing of event streams (either offline or in realtime) both fun and simple. BeepBeep is the result of more than a decade of research lead by a team at Laboratoire d'informatique formelle at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (Canada). Over the past few years, BeepBeep has been involved in a variety of case studies, and provides built-in support for writing domain-specific languages. Recently, a complete textbook has been published on BeepBeep, testifying to the maturity that the system has acquired.

Starting from basic concepts, this step-by-step tutorial will lead the audience through a variety of concrete use cases where event logs can be processed, analyzed, and provide actionable information about complex systems. Possible examples will include:

• the dection of bugs during the execution of a video game;
• the analysis of a heart rate monitor;
• the detection of errors in an automated surgery instrument;
• the processing of data from NASA's Voyager space probes;
• the application of clustering algorithms on business process engine logs.

Interest for practicioners

This tutorial shall prove interesting in two respects. First, there are more available examples than the time allows, and the audience will be asked to choose which ones they want to explore with the presenter.

Second, an interesting feature of BeepBeep is that all code examples have an appealing and colorful graphical representation (see Figure above), which provides an intuitive way of understanding what is happening "under the hood". Participants shall leave this tutorial with a good preliminary knowledge of the potential of log analysis and event stream processing in various fields, which may lead them to try these techniques on their own complex systems.

For more information

Please contact Sylvain Hallé for any question related to the contents of the tutorial.