KabOOM: Unsupervised Crash Categorization through Timeseries Fingerprinting

by Yao, Edward and Dyer, Wes and Gousios, Georgios

You can get a pre-print version from here.

Abstract

Modern mobile applications include instrumentation that sample internal application metrics at regular intervals. Following a crash, sample metrics are collected and can potentially be valuable for root-causing difficult to diagnose crashes. However, the fine-grained nature and overwhelming wealth of available application metrics, coupled with frequent application updates, renders their use for root-causing crashes extremely difficult. We propose KabOOM, a method to automatically cluster telemetry reports in intuitive, distinct crash categories. Uniquely, KabOOM relies on multivariate timeseries fingerprinting; an auto-encoder coupled with a cluster centroid optimization technique learns embeddings of each crash report, which are then used to cluster metric timeseries based crash reports. We demonstrate the effectiveness of KabOOM on both reducing the dimensionality of the incoming crash reports and producing crash categories that are intuitive to developers.

Bibtex record

@misc{YDG21pp,
  title = {KabOOM: Unsupervised Crash Categorization through Timeseries Fingerprinting},
  author = {Yao, Edward and Dyer, Wes and Gousios, Georgios},
  year = {2021},
  eprint = {2110.10450},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.SE},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.10450.pdf}
}

The paper