Transaction Dependency Graph Construction using Signal Injection

Understanding the runtime behavior and dependencies between components in complex transaction-based enterprise systems enables the system administrators to identify performance bottlenecks, allocate resources, and detect failures. This paper introduces a novel method for extracting dependency information between system components at runtime by using delay injection on individual links and Fast Fourier Transforms. Our proposed method introduces minimal disturbance in the system and its execution time is independent of the system workload. Thus, it can be used at runtime in production systems. Furthermore, it avoids false positives introduced by other methods. We present preliminary experimental results that demonstrate that our approach is able to identify dependencies, avoid false positives, while ensuring low perturbation to the target system.