arXiv subjects

Yongqiang Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Yongqiang Yang.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Adaptive Performance Anomaly Detection for Online Service Systems via Pattern Sketching

To ensure the performance of online service systems, their status is closely monitored with various software and system metrics. Performance anomalies represent the performance degradation issues (e.g., slow response) of the service systems. When performing anomaly detection over the metrics, existing methods often lack the merit of interpretability, which is vital for engineers and analysts to take remediation actions. Moreover, they are unable to effectively accommodate the ever-changing services in an online fashion. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose ADSketch, an interpretable and adaptive performance anomaly detection approach based on pattern sketching. ADSketch achieves interpretability by identifying groups of anomalous metric patterns, which represent particular types of performance issues. The underlying issues can then be immediately recognized if similar patterns emerge again. In addition, an adaptive learning algorithm is designed to embrace unprecedented patterns induced by service updates or user behavior changes. The proposed approach is evaluated with public data as well as industrial data collected from a representative online service system in Huawei Cloud. The experimental results show that ADSketch outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the online algorithm in new pattern discovery. Furthermore, our approach has been successfully deployed in industrial practice.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Characterizing and Mitigating Anti-patterns of Alerts in Industrial Cloud Systems

Alerts are crucial for requesting prompt human intervention upon cloud anomalies. The quality of alerts significantly affects the cloud reliability and the cloud provider's business revenue. In practice, we observe on-call engineers being hindered from quickly locating and fixing faulty cloud services because of the vast existence of misleading, non-informative, non-actionable alerts. We call the ineffectiveness of alerts "anti-patterns of alerts". To better understand the anti-patterns of alerts and provide actionable measures to mitigate anti-patterns, in this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the practices of mitigating anti-patterns of alerts in an industrial cloud system. We study the alert strategies and the alert processing procedure at Huawei Cloud, a leading cloud provider. Our study combines the quantitative analysis of millions of alerts in two years and a survey with eighteen experienced engineers. As a result, we summarized four individual anti-patterns and two collective anti-patterns of alerts. We also summarize four current reactions to mitigate the anti-patterns of alerts, and the general preventative guidelines for the configuration of alert strategy. Lastly, we propose to explore the automatic evaluation of the Quality of Alerts (QoA), including the indicativeness, precision, and handleability of alerts, as a future research direction that assists in the automatic detection of alerts' anti-patterns. The findings of our study are valuable for optimizing cloud monitoring systems and improving the reliability of cloud services.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Graph-based Incident Aggregation for Large-Scale Online Service Systems

As online service systems continue to grow in terms of complexity and volume, how service incidents are managed will significantly impact company revenue and user trust. Due to the cascading effect, cloud failures often come with an overwhelming number of incidents from dependent services and devices. To pursue efficient incident management, related incidents should be quickly aggregated to narrow down the problem scope. To this end, in this paper, we propose GRLIA, an incident aggregation framework based on graph representation learning over the cascading graph of cloud failures. A representation vector is learned for each unique type of incident in an unsupervised and unified manner, which is able to simultaneously encode the topological and temporal correlations among incidents. Thus, it can be easily employed for online incident aggregation. In particular, to learn the correlations more accurately, we try to recover the complete scope of failures' cascading impact by leveraging fine-grained system monitoring data, i.e., Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The proposed framework is evaluated with real-world incident data collected from a large-scale online service system of Huawei Cloud. The experimental results demonstrate that GRLIA is effective and outperforms existing methods. Furthermore, our framework has been successfully deployed in industrial practice.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

AID: Efficient Prediction of Aggregated Intensity of Dependency in Large-scale Cloud Systems

Service reliability is one of the key challenges that cloud providers have to deal with. In cloud systems, unplanned service failures may cause severe cascading impacts on their dependent services, deteriorating customer satisfaction. Predicting the cascading impacts accurately and efficiently is critical to the operation and maintenance of cloud systems. Existing approaches identify whether one service depends on another via distributed tracing but no prior work focused on discriminating to what extent the dependency between cloud services is. In this paper, we survey the outages and the procedure for failure diagnosis in two cloud providers to motivate the definition of the intensity of dependency. We define the intensity of dependency between two services as how much the status of the callee service influences the caller service. Then we propose AID, the first approach to predict the intensity of dependencies between cloud services. AID first generates a set of candidate dependency pairs from the spans. AID then represents the status of each cloud service with a multivariate time series aggregated from the spans. With the representation of services, AID calculates the similarities between the statuses of the caller and the callee of each candidate pair. Finally, AID aggregates the similarities to produce a unified value as the intensity of the dependency. We evaluate AID on the data collected from an open-source microservice benchmark and a cloud system in production. The experimental results show that AID can efficiently and accurately predict the intensity of dependencies. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our method in a large-scale commercial cloud system.

cs.SE↗