ANALYZE-NOW - AN ENVIRONMENT FOR COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS OF FAILURES IN A NETWORK OF WORKSTATIONS

This paper describes Analyze-NOW, an environment for collection & anal ysis of failures/errors in a network of workstations, Descriptions cov er the data collection methodology and the tool implemented to facilit ate this process, Software tools used for analysis are described, with emphasis on the details of the implementation of the Analyzer, the pr imary analysis tool. Application of the tools is demonstrated by using them to collect & analyze failure data (for 32-week period) from a ne twork of 69 SunOS-based workstations. Classification based on the sour ce & effect of faults is used to identify problem areas, Different typ es of failures encountered on the machines & network are highlighted t o develop a proper understanding of failures in a network environment. The results from the analysis tool should be used to pinpoint the pro blem areas in the network. The results obtained from using Analyze-NOW on failure data from the monitored network reveal some interesting be havior of the network, Nearly 70% of the failures were network-related , whereas disk errors were few. Network-related failures were 75% of a ll hard-failures (failures that make a workstation unusable). Half of the network-related failures were due to servers not responding to cli ents, and half were performance-related and others, Problem areas in t he network were found using this tool, Our approach was compared to th e method of using the network architecture to locate problem areas, Th is comparison showed that locating problem areas using network archite cture over-estimates the number of problem areas.