Traveling Back in Time: A Visual Debugger for Stream Processing Applications

Abstract

Stream processing takes on an important role as a hot topic of our time. More and more applications generate large amounts of heterogeneous data that need to be processed in real-time. However, the dynamic and high frequent nature of stream processing applications complicates the debugging process since the constant flow of data can not be slowed down, paused, or reverted to previous states to analyze the execution step-by-step. In this demonstration, we present StreamVizzard's visual and interactive pipeline debugger that allows reverting the pipeline state to any arbitrary point in the past to review or repeat critical parts of the pipeline step by step. During this process, our extensive visualizer allows to explore the processed data and statistics of each operator to retrace and understand the data flow and behavior of the pipeline.