Trace information collecting system and program

Abstract

Occurrence of a failure in a computer system is appropriately detected, and information required for removing the failure is automatically collected. A trace information collecting system of the present invention which collects trace information indicating the course of processing of a program comprises a history recording section for recording a history of run and stop of a target program for which the trace information is to be produced, a similarity calculating section for calculating a degree of similarity between a first operation pattern in which the target program ran and stopped at the last time and a second operation pattern in which the target program ran and stopped at the time before last when the target program, which once stopped, starts to run, a failure occurrence determining section for determining that a failure occurred when the target program ran at the last time on condition that the similarity calculated by the similarity calculating section is lower than a reference similarity, and a trace information collecting section for collecting the trace information from the target program in response to the determination that the failure occurred, wherein the trace information is not collected if it is determined that the failure did not occur.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This is a continuation application of U.S. application Ser. No. 11 / 337,377 filed on Jan. 23, 2006, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.BACKGROUND of the INVENTION[0002]The present invention relates to a trace information collecting system, a trace information collecting method, and a trace information collecting program, more particularly to a trace information collecting system, a trace information collecting method, and a trace information collecting program which collect trace information indicating the course of processing of a program.[0003]If a failure has occurred in a computer system being operated in a company or other entity, processing is advanced, for example, in the following flow in order to remove the failure.[0004](1) A failure has occurred in the computer system being operated.[0005](2) A program module which has caused the failure is specified by analysis by a person in charge of the system.[0006](3...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The present invention is a system that collects information about the processing of a program. It includes a history recording section that keeps track of the last time a program stopped and started again. When the program stops again, the system calculates the similarity between the previous and current stop patterns. If the similarity is lower than a certain threshold, the system determines that a failure occurred. Only when a failure is detected, the system collects the necessary information to fix or remove the problem. This invention helps to detect and fix failures in computer systems automatically.

Problems solved by technology

(1) A failure has occurred in the computer system being operated.

Additionally, in order to change the setting of the computer system being operated, approval of a user or an owner should be obtained, which would take much time in many cases.

Therefore, the computer system is not permitted to be stopped for a long time in order to investigate a cause of a failure occurring in the computer system.

Therefore, even if the failure has occurred, the computer system is instantly restarted, and in many cases it is not possible to secure a time for obtaining the approval to acquire the truce information.

Thus, in many cases, it has been difficult to remove the failure from the computer system being operated.

However, in the computer system, unlike the transaction, it is often difficult to determine whether or not a failure has occurred.

On the other hand, in the computer system, a failure often occurs due to composite factors of various modules, and an abnormal operation may occur even if each of the modules is normal.

Furthermore, there may be a case in which processing is interrupted for some operational reason even if an actual failure does not occur.

Thus, it is difficult to determine whether a failure has actually occurred in the computer system and, hence, to determine appropriate timing for producing trace information.

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