Exploratory Data Analysis in Functional-Style Python

Here are some tricks to working with log file extracts. We're looking at some Enterprise Splunk extracts. We can fiddle around with Splunk, trying to explore the data. Or we can get a simple extract and fiddle around with the data in Python.

Running different experiments in Python seems to be more effective than trying to do this kind of exploratory fiddling in Splunk. Primarily because there aren't any boundaries on what we can do with the data. We can create very sophisticated statistical models all in one place.

Theoretically, we can do a lot of exploration in Splunk. It has a variety of reporting and analytical features.

But...

Using Splunk presumes we know what we're looking for. In many cases, we don't know what we're looking for: we're exploring. We may have some indication that a few RESTful API transactions are slow, but little more than that. How do we proceed?

Step one is to get raw data in CSV format. Now what?

Reading Raw Data

We'll start by wrapping a CSV.DictReader object with some additional functions.

Object-Oriented Purists will object to this strategy. "Why not just extend DictReader?" they ask. I don't have a great answer. I lean toward functional programming and the resulting orthogonality of components. With a purely OO approach, we have to use more complex-seeming mixins to achieve this.

Our general framework for processing logs is this.

with open("somefile.csv") as source:
    rdr = csv.DictReader(source)

This allows us to read the CSV-formatted Splunk extract. We can iterate through rows in the reader. Here's trick #1. It's not really very tricky, but I like it.

with open("somefile.csv") as source:
    rdr = csv.DictReader(source)
    for row in rdr:
        print( "{host} {ResponseTime} {source} {Service}".format_map(row) )

We can -- to a limited extent -- report raw data in a helpful format. If we want to dress up the output, we can change the format string. Maybe "{host:30s} {ReponseTime:8s} {source:s}" or something like that.

Filtering

A common situation is that we've extracted too much, and only need to see a subset. We can change the Splunk filter, but, we hate to overcommit before we've finished our exploration. It's far easier to filter in Python. Once we've learned what we need, we can finalize in Splunk.

with open("somefile.csv") as source:
    rdr = csv.DictReader(source)
    rdr_perf_log = (row for row in rdr if row['source'] == 'perf_log')
    for row in rdr_perf_log:
        print( "{host} {ResponseTime} {Service}".format_map(row) )

We've injected a generator expression that will filter the source rows, allowing us to work with a meaningful subset.

Projection

In some cases, we'll have additional columns of source data that we don't really want to use. We'll eliminate this data by making a projection of each row.

In principle, Splunk never produces an empty column. However, RESTful API logs may lead to data sets with a huge number of unique column titles based on surrogate keys that are part of request URI's. These columns will have one row of data from the one request that used that surrogate key. For every other row, there's nothing useful in that column. Life is much simpler if we remove the empty columns from each row.

We can do this with a generator expression, also, but it gets a bit long. A generator function is somewhat easier to read.

def project(reader):
    for row in reader:
        yield {k:v for k,v in row.items() if v}

We've built a new row dictionary from a subset of the items in the original reader. We can use this to wrap the output of our filter.

with open("somefile.csv") as source:
    rdr = csv.DictReader(source)
    rdr_perf_log = (row for row in rdr if row['source'] == 'perf_log')
    for row in project(rdr_perf_log):
        print( "{host} {ResponseTime} {Service}".format_map(row) )

This will reduce the unused columns that are visible in the inside of the for statement.

Notation Change

The row['source'] notation will get clunky. It's much nicer to work with a types.SimpleNamespace than a dictionary. This allows us to use row.source.

Here's a cool trick to create something more useful.

rdr_ns = (types.SimpleNamespace(**row) for row in reader)

We can fold this into our sequence of steps like this.

with open("somefile.csv") as source:
    rdr = csv.DictReader(source)
    rdr_perf_log = (row for row in rdr if row['source'] == 'perf_log')
    rdr_proj = project(rdr_perf_log)
    rdr_ns = (types.SimpleNamespace(**row) for row in rdr_proj)
    for row in rdr_ns:
        print( "{host} {ResponseTime} {Service}".format_map(vars(row)) )

Note the small change to our format_map() method. We've added the vars() function to extract a dictionary from the attributes of a SimpleNamespace.

We could write this as a function to preserve syntactic symmetry with other functions.

def ns_reader(reader):
    return (types.SimpleNamespace(**row) for row in reader)

Indeed, we could write this as a lambda construct which is used like a function.

ns_reader = lambda reader: (types.SimpleNamespace(**row) for row in reader)

While the ns_reader() function and ns_reader() lambda are used the same way, it's slightly harder to write a document string and doctest unit test for a lambda. For this reason, a lambda should probably be avoided.

We can use map(lambda row: types.SimpleNamespace(**row), reader). Some folks prefer this over the generator expression.

We could use a proper for statement with an internal yield statement, but there doesn't seem to be any benefit from making a big statement out of a small thing.

We have a lot of choices because Python offers so many functional programming features. We don't often see Python touted as a functional language. Yet, we have a variety of ways to handle a simple mapping.

Mappings: Conversions and Derived Data

We'll often have a list of data conversions that are pretty obvious. Plus, we'll have a growing list of derived data items. The derived items will be dynamic and are based on different hypotheses we're testing. Each time we have an experiment or question, we might change the derived data.

Each of these steps: filtering, projection, conversions, and derivation, are stages in the "map" portion of a map-reduce pipeline. We could create a number of smaller functions and apply them with map(). Because we're updating a stateful object, we can't use the general map() function.  If we wanted to achieve a more pure functional programming style, we'd use an immutable namedtuple instead of a mutable SimpleNamespace.

def convert(reader):
    for row in reader:
        row._time = datetime.datetime.strptime(row.Time, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%F%Z")
        row.response_time = float(row.ResponseTime)
        yield row

As we explore, we'll adjust the body of this conversion function. Perhaps we'll start with some minimal set of conversions and derivations. We'll extend this with some "are these right?" kind of things. We'll take some out when we discover that the don't work.

Our overall processing looks like this:

with open("somefile.csv") as source:
    rdr = csv.DictReader(source)
    rdr_perf_log = (row for row in rdr if row['source'] == 'perf_log')
    rdr_proj = project(rdr_perf_log)
    rdr_ns = (types.SimpleNamespace(**row) for row in rdr_proj)
    rdr_converted = convert(rdr_ns)
    for row in rdr_converted:
        row.start_time = row._time - datetime.timedelta(seconds=row.response_time)
        row.service = some_mapping(row.Service)
        print( "{host:30s} {start_time:%H:%M:%S} {response_time:6.3f} {service}".format_map(vars(row)) )

Note that change in the body of our for statement. Our convert() function produces values we're sure of. We've added some additional variables inside the for loop that we're not 100% sure of. We'll see if they're helpful (or even correct) before updating the convert() function.

Reductions

When it comes to reductions, we can adopt a slightly different style of processing. We need to refactor our previous example, and turn it into a generator function.

def converted_log(some_file):
    with open(some_file) as source:
        rdr = csv.DictReader(source)
        rdr_perf_log = (row for row in rdr if row['source'] == 'perf_log')
        rdr_proj = project(rdr_perf_log)
        rdr_ns = (types.SimpleNamespace(**row) for row in rdr_proj)
        rdr_converted = convert(rdr_ns)
        for row in rdr_converted:
            row.start_time = row._time - datetime.timedelta(seconds=row.response_time)
            row.service = some_mapping(row.Service)
            yield row

We've replace the print() with a yield.

Here's the other part of this refactoring.

for row in converted_log("somefile.csv"):
    print( "{host:30s} {start_time:%H:%M:%S} {response_time:6.3f} {service}".format_map(vars(row)) )

Ideally, all of our programming looks like this. We use a generator function to produce data. The final display of the data is kept entirely separate. This allows us to refactor and change the processing much more freely.

Now we can do things like collect rows into Counter() objects, or perhaps compute some statistics. We might use a defaultdict(list) to group rows by service.

by_service= defaultdict(list)
for row in converted_log("somefile.csv"):
    by_service[row.service] = row.response_time
for svc in sorted(by_service):
    m = statistics.mean( by_service[svc] )
    print( "{svc:15s} {m:.2f}".format_map(vars()) )

We've decided to create concrete list objects here. We can use itertools to group the response times by service. It looks like proper functional programming, but the implementation points up some  limitations in the Pythonic form of functional programming. Either we have to sort the data (creating a list object) or we have to create lists as we group the data. In order to do several different statistics, it's often easier to group data by creating concrete lists.

Rather than simply printing a row object, we're now doing two things.

1. Create some local variables, like svc and m. We can easily add variance or other measures.
2. Use the vars() function with no arguments, which creates a dictionary out of the local variables.

This use of vars() with no arguments -- which behaves like locals() -- is a handy trick. It allows us to simply create any local variables we want and include them in the formatted output. We can hack in as many different kinds of statistical measures as we think might be relevant.

Now that our essential processing loop is for row in converted_log("somefile.csv"), we can explore a lot of processing alternatives in a tiny, easy-to-modify script. We can explore a number of hypotheses to determine why a some RESTful API transactions are slow and others are fast.