Would you like a quick peek? providing logging support to monitor data processing in big data applications

To analyze large-scale data efficiently, developers have created various big data processing frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark). These big data processing frameworks provide abstractions to developers so that they can focus on implementing the data analysis logic. In traditional software systems, developers leverage logging to monitor applications and record intermediate states to assist workload understanding and issue diagnosis. However, due to the abstraction and the peculiarity of big data frameworks, there is currently no effective monitoring approach for big data applications. In this paper, we first manually study 1,000 randomly sampled Spark-related questions on Stack Overflow to study their root causes and the type of information, if recorded, that can assist developers with motioning and diagnosis. Then, we design an approach, DPLOG, which assists developers with monitoring Spark applications. DPLOG leverages statistical sampling to minimize performance overhead and provides intermediate information and hint/warning messages for each data processing step of a chained method pipeline. We evaluate DPLOG on six benchmarking programs and find that DPLOG has a relatively small overhead (i.e., less than 10% increase in response time when processing 5GB data) compared to without using DPLOG, and reduce the overhead by over 500% compared to the baseline. Our user study with 20 developers shows that DPLOG can reduce the needed time to debug big data applications by 63% and the participants give DPLOG an average of 4.85/5 for its usefulness. The idea of DPLOG may be applied to other big data processing frameworks, and our study sheds light on future research opportunities in assisting developers with monitoring big data applications.