Automated Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis in Virtualized Cloud Infrastructures

Cloud data centers today use virtualization technologies to facilitate allocation of physical resources to multiple applications. As cloud data centers continue to grow in scale and complexity, effectively monitoring and identifying system anomalies is becoming a critical problem. Furthermore, due to complex dependencies between system components in a virtualized data center, a single cause of anomaly can typically trigger multiple alarms. Therefore there is also a need to efficiently analyze and identify the causes of the anomalies in a scalable and effective manner, in order to reduce the overhead of diagnosis and troubleshooting performed by the cloud operator. Motivated by these observations, we present a mechanism for automatic anomaly detection and root cause analysis in virtualized cloud data centers. We first use unsupervised learning techniques to identify abnormal system behaviors, and then propose a technique for root cause analysis with consideration to anomaly propagation among system components. Using a real virtualized cloud testbed, we show that our mechanism efficiently identifies system anomalies and accurately determines their causes.