https://github.com/fntneves/falcon

Falcon: A practical log-based analysis tool for distributed systems
https://github.com/fntneves/falcon

Last synced: 22 days ago
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Falcon: A practical log-based analysis tool for distributed systems

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/fntneves/falcon
• Owner: fntneves
• License: mit
• Created: 2018-03-08T10:25:00.000Z (almost 7 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2021-04-03T16:03:16.000Z (over 3 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-08-05T17:27:04.653Z (4 months ago)
• Language: Java
• Size: 10.1 MB
• Stars: 31
• Watchers: 8
• Forks: 4
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

        
# Falcon: Practical Log-based Analysis for Distributed Systems

Falcon is a tool aimed at easing the understanding of distributed system executions. Falcon ingests events logged by popular tracing tools (e.g. eBPF, strace, log4j) and merges them into a single causally-coherent execution trace. To further improve the reasoning about the runtime behavior of the system, Falcon also generates a space-time diagram depicting the events and their happens-before dependencies.

The architecture of Falcon is composed of three main components that operate together as a pipeline:

- **falcon-tracer** uses eBPF to trace events of interest (e.g. start, end, fork, join, send, receive, etc) at runtime. 

- **falcon-solver** combines the events into a global execution trace that preserves causality. This is achieved by *i)* building a symbolic constraint model that encodes the *happens-before* relationships between events, *ii)* using an SMT solver to solve the constraints and assign a logical clock to each event such that all causal dependencies are satisfied.

- **falcon-visualizer** draws a space-time diagram that enables a visual analysis of the whole execution.

For additional details about Falcon, please check our [DSN'18 paper](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8416513/).

## Installation

Falcon's components are independent and, therefore, can be leveraged by different projects. To set up the full pipeline, install each particular component according to the following instructions:

- [Install falcon-tracer](https://github.com/fntneves/falcon/tree/master/falcon-tracer)

- [Install falcon-solver](https://github.com/fntneves/falcon/tree/master/falcon-solver)

- [Install falcon-visualizer](https://github.com/fntneves/falcon/tree/master/falcon-visualizer)

## Usage

Falcon operates in three different phases, namely *event tracing*, *causality inference*, and *space-time diagram visualization*. Each phase is performed by a particular component of Falcon: 

- [Event tracing with falcon-tracer](https://github.com/fntneves/falcon/tree/master/falcon-tracer)

- [Causality inference with falcon-solver](https://github.com/fntneves/falcon/tree/master/falcon-solver)

- [Diagram visualization with falcon-visualizer](https://github.com/fntneves/falcon/tree/master/falcon-visualizer)

For a concrete example of how to use falcon in practice, please check our [Tutorial - Falcon with Zookeeper](https://github.com/fntneves/falcon/tree/master/docs/examples/zookeeper).