WMWatcher: Preventing Workload-Related Misconfigurations in Production Environment

Among the misconfigurations with increasing preva-lence and severity in recent years, workload-related misconfigu-rations, i.e. misconfigurations under certain workloads with valid configuration values, account for a significant portion. Since the runtime constraints of configuration parameters are influenced by workloads, piror researches could not handle workload-related misconfigurations at present. To solve the situation mentioned above, we conducted an empirical study on how configuration variables interact with other program variables, and summarized five handling type of the interactions happen in branch statements. Based on the study, we proposed WMWatcher to help system admins to prevent workload-related misconfigurations in production environment. WMWatcher infers the runtime constraints of configuration parameters under certain workload by instrumenting probes in source code and monitoring the corresponding status. The experiments on seven open-source software systems proved that WMWatcher could automatically instrument proper probes while bringing only 2.33% extra runtime overhead at most. And the case study demonstrates the effectiveness of WMWatcher in preventing workload-related misconfigurations in real-world scenarios.