  Current generation of Internet-based services are typically hosted on large
data centers that take the form of warehouse-size structures housing tens of
thousands of servers. Continued availability of a modern data center is the
result of a complex orchestration among many internal and external actors
including computing hardware, multiple layers of intricate software, networking
and storage devices, electrical power and cooling plants. During the course of
their operation, many of these components produce large amounts of data in the
form of event and error logs that are essential not only for identifying and
resolving problems but also for improving data center efficiency and
management. Most of these activities would benefit significantly from data
analytics techniques to exploit hidden statistical patterns and correlations
that may be present in the data. The sheer volume of data to be analyzed makes
uncovering these correlations and patterns a challenging task. This paper
presents BiDAl, a prototype Java tool for log-data analysis that incorporates
several Big Data technologies in order to simplify the task of extracting
information from data traces produced by large clusters and server farms. BiDAl
provides the user with several analysis languages (SQL, R and Hadoop MapReduce)
and storage backends (HDFS and SQLite) that can be freely mixed and matched so
that a custom tool for a specific task can be easily constructed. BiDAl has a
modular architecture so that it can be extended with other backends and
analysis languages in the future. In this paper we present the design of BiDAl
and describe our experience using it to analyze publicly-available traces from
Google data clusters, with the goal of building a realistic model of a complex
data center.
