ExChain: Exception Dependency Analysis for Root Cause Diagnosis

Explore a groundbreaking approach to diagnosing exception-handling failures in large-scale online services through this conference talk from NSDI '24. Delve into the design and implementation of ExChain, a framework that addresses the challenges of implicit dependencies, silent code handling, and separation between root cause and failure manifestation. Learn how ExChain constructs causal links between exceptions by tracking critical system states and employing state-impact analysis. Discover the novel hybrid taint tracking approach used to balance performance overhead and accuracy. Examine the framework's effectiveness in identifying root causes for subtle exception-dependent failures across popular applications, and compare its performance to state-of-the-art approaches. Gain insights into ExChain's superior accuracy-performance tradeoffs relative to traditional static and dynamic analysis methods.