Non-deterministic diagnosis of end-to-end service failures in a multi-layer communication system

Fault localization is a process of isolating faults responsible for the observable malfunctioning of the managed system. Previously, fault localization efforts concentrated mostly on diagnosing faults related to the availability of network resources in the lowest layers of the protocol stack. This paper focuses on end-to-end service failure diagnosis as a critical step towards multi-layer fault localization in an enterprise environment. By refining a previously proposed modeling technique, we present a universal method of modeling both availability and performance related problems associated with end-to-end services in a non-deterministic fashion. We introduce and evaluate a novel algorithm that allows an event-driven, incremental diagnosis of end-to-end service failures.