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

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].

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• McMenamy, Josiah

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Sharma, Upamanyu
• Kaashoek, M. Frans

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/162976

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/162976