NAP: A building block for remediating performance bottlenecks via black box network analysis

Abstract

In this work we present a simple, yet powerful, methodology for application-agnostic diagnostic and remediation of performance hot spots in elastic multi-tiered client/server applications, deployed as collections of black box Virtual Machines (VM). Our novel out-ofband black-box performance management system, Network Analysis for Remediating Performance Bottlenecks (NAP), listens to the TCP/IP traffic on the virtual network interfaces of the VMs comprising an application and analyzes statistical properties of this traffic. From this analysis, which is application independent and transparent to the VMs, NAP identifies performance bottlenecks that might effect application performance and derives remediation decisions that are most likely to alleviate the application performance degradation. We prototyped our solution for the Xen hypervisor and evaluated it using the popular Trade6 benchmark that simulates a typical e-commerce application. Our results show that NAP successfully identifies performance bottlenecks in a complex multi-tier application setting, while incurring negligible performance overhead.