Blackbox Strategies for Detecting Service Performance Anomalies in Virtualized Environments

In order to prevent violation of service-level objectives and to guarantee good user experience, detection of symptoms such as slow application response, degraded transaction throughput, and service outages, is crucial. We propose a black-box approach for detecting such symptoms in service performance behaviour without intrusive application instrumentation. In case a known baseline behaviour exists, we employ kernel density estimation to discover deviations from a given set of baseline measurements. Conversely, when no baseline exists, we apply statistical process control charts on prediction errors obtained from Holt-Winter’s double exponential smoothing to identify anomalies in metric time-series. We evaluate our methods on tail response times traces collected from experiments conducted in a real testbed under realistic load and fault injections. Results show the applicability of our approach for improving service assurance and also demonstrate how service level anomalies correlate with system-level events such as resource contention and bottlenecks.