Log Data Modeling and Acquisition in Supporting SaaS Software Performance Issue Diagnosis

Abstract

Data logging is helpful for the operation and maintenance manager of SaaS-based solutions to diagnose performance issues. However, long-running SaaS software may generate huge amounts of log data which is difficult to analyze, and it lacks a systematic approach to collect the running log and lacks a unified data structure to normalize the performance-related data. All these threaten the timeliness of SaaS performance issue diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an architecture for log collection and analysis to support the assessment of performance and diagnosis of performance issues of SaaS-based application in cloud computing. The architecture has the three-tier structure and includes a pivot data model to integrate heterogeneous log. The two high-level metrics in the model of Average Response Time (ART) and Request Timeout Rate (RTR) are calculated by statistical measurement and the lower-level metrics are monitored in real-time. Operation and maintenance managers can evaluate the performance of SaaS software based on the high-level metrics, then timely locate the issues from the low-level metrics and take appropriate measures. Thereupon, this study presents the general-purpose technique for the architecture to support real-time big log data collection, access, computation, storage. The proposal has been implemented and validated in a case study.