Towards Safer Heuristics With XPlain

TL;DR

XPlain is a tool that enhances heuristic analyzers by providing detailed explanations of when and why heuristics underperform, helping operators improve their decision-making in computationally expensive cloud problems.

Contribution

This paper introduces XPlain, an extension to heuristic analyzers that offers detailed insights into heuristic underperformance, addressing limitations of existing tools.

Findings

Initial results show XPlain can effectively identify underperformance causes.

XPlain provides more comprehensive explanations than existing heuristic analyzers.

The approach is promising for improving heuristic reliability in cloud operations.

Abstract

Many problems that cloud operators solve are computationally expensive, and operators often use heuristic algorithms (that are faster and scale better than optimal) to solve them more efficiently. Heuristic analyzers enable operators to find when and by how much their heuristics underperform. However, these tools do not provide enough detail for operators to mitigate the heuristic's impact in practice: they only discover a single input instance that causes the heuristic to underperform (and not the full set), and they do not explain why. We propose XPlain, a tool that extends these analyzers and helps operators understand when and why their heuristics underperform. We present promising initial results that show such an extension is viable.