Comparing Error Detection Techniques for Web Applications: An Experimental Study

Web applications are highly sensitive to the occurrence of user-visible failures. Despite the usage of system-level monitoring tools there are still some application-level errors that escape to those tools and end up to be seen in the Web pages of the final users. Complementary error detection mechanisms should then be used to overcome this problem.In this paper, we present an experimental study where we measured the effectiveness of four different error-detection mechanisms under different fault-load. For the effect we used two benchmarks (JPetstore and TPC-W) and a software fault-injector. The results show that although system-level monitoring tools are very effective in most of the cases, there are other detection mechanisms that present a better latency and coverage when dealing with errors at the application-level. Particularly, the usage of external monitoring schemes seems to be of utmost importance.