Fundamentals of Trace and Log Analysis: A Pattern-Oriented Approach to Monitoring, Diagnostics, and Debugging

This book will help you analyze traces and logs from different software environments and communicate analysis results using a pattern language that covers everything from a small debugging log to a distributed trace with billions of messages from hundreds of computers, thousands of software components, threads, and processes.

The book begins with the basic terminology of operating systems and programming, the foundation for understanding trace and log analysis. It then talks about patterns that help describe problems from a user’s view and patterns for errors and failures. Then, the book covers a range of trace patterns that group messages, and explores how logs depict software activities. It even examines specific message patterns and how they connect in a single trace. Moving forward, you’ll review patterns for multiple traces and logs and how to evaluate them. In this way, you can use similar methods to find problems across a wide variety of software. The book also provides guidance for analyzing issues on systems such as Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and other types of computers, including those in networks and the Internet of Things, regardless of their system differences.

Upon completing this book, you will be able to navigate the complexities of trace and log analysis and apply uniform diagnostics and anomaly detection pattern language across diverse software environments to help you troubleshoot, debug, and fix issues.

What You Will Learn

• Understand pattern language for trace and log analysis
• Gain a pattern-oriented methodology for trace and log analysis applicable to various domains, including cybersecurity
• Master the fundamentals of operating systems and programming related to trace and log analysis
• Understand observed behavior in traces and logs, which aids incident response, diagnostics, root cause analysis, troubleshooting, and debugging

Who This Book Is For

Software technical support engineers, system and network administrators, software developers, testers, DevOps and DevSecOps, digital forensics and malware analysts, security incident response engineers, data analysts, and data mining practitioners.

About the Author

Dmitry Vostokov is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, educator, scientist, inventor, and author. He founded the pattern-oriented software diagnostics, forensics, and prognostics discipline (Systematic Software Diagnostics) and Software Diagnostics Institute (DA+TA: DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org). Vostokov has also authored multiple books on software diagnostics, anomaly detection and analysis, software, and memory forensics, root cause analysis and problem-solving, memory dump analysis, debugging, software trace and log analysis, reverse engineering, and malware analysis. He has over thirty years of experience in software architecture, design, development, and maintenance in various industries, including leadership, technical, and people management roles. In his spare time, he presents multiple topics on Debugging.TV and explores Software Narratology and its further development as Narratology of Things and Diagnostics of Things (DoT), Software Pathology, and Quantum Software Diagnostics. His current interest areas are theoretical software diagnostics and its mathematical and computer science foundations, application of formal logic, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining to diagnostics and anomaly detection, software diagnostics engineering and diagnostics-driven development, diagnostics workflow, and interaction. Recent interest areas also include cloud native computing, security, automation, functional programming, applications of category theory to software development and big data, and artificial intelligence diagnostics.