2016-004 - Tiago Antunes - Bachelor Thesis

Background

Aspera is a highly specialized provider of software asset management solutions. Aspera’s main product is SmartTrack: a software asset management tool used by hundreds of companies worldwide. SmartTrack uses emails containing error logs as the main way to communicate failures in production environments. Up to a thousand such emails are currently sent each day. This number has been tending to increase over time. Hence, manual processing of these emails has become unpractical. The available data cannot be processed in an optimal way, neglecting a possible approach to quickly identify critical software failures. Consequently, a complaint by an affected customer is often required to find critical bugs among less important ones. A variety of tools with log management capabilities already exist, such as Splunk and the Elastic Stack. These tools can possibly be used to support an improved error handling process.

Goal

The goal of this thesis is to improve the current error handling process of SmartTrack by developing a concept for state of the art tool-assisted error log analysis and monitoring. The concept shall then be implemented and evaluated towards use in production. The resulting process is intended to allow for the identification of severe bugs and failures directly when failures occur, so that they can be handled more quickly and without requiring prior escalation by the customer.