Predicting Performance Anomalies in Software Systems at Run-time

Abstract

High performance is a critical factor to achieve and maintain the success of a software system. Performance anomalies represent the performance degradation issues (e.g., slowing down in system response times) of software systems at run-time. Performance anomalies can cause a dramatically negative impact on users' satisfaction. Prior studies propose different approaches to detect anomalies by analyzing execution logs and resource utilization metrics after the anomalies have happened. However, the prior detection approaches cannot predict the anomalies ahead of time; such limitation causes an inevitable delay in taking corrective actions to prevent performance anomalies from happening. We propose an approach that can predict performance anomalies in software systems and raise anomaly warnings in advance. Our approach uses a Long-Short Term Memory neural network to capture the normal behaviors of a software system. Then, our approach predicts performance anomalies by identifying the early deviations from the captured normal system behaviors. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our approach using two real-world software systems (i.e., Elasticsearch and Hadoop). We compare the performance of our approach with two baselines. The first baseline is one state-to-the-art baseline called Unsupervised Behavior Learning. The second baseline predicts performance anomalies by checking if the resource utilization exceeds pre-defined thresholds. Our results show that our approach can predict various performance anomalies with high precision (i.e., 97-100%) and recall (i.e., 80-100%), while the baselines achieve 25-97% precision and 93-100% recall. For a range of performance anomalies, our approach can achieve sufficient lead times that vary from 20 to 1,403 s (i.e., 23.4 min). We also demonstrate the ability of our approach to predict the performance anomalies that are caused by real-world performance bugs. For predicting performance anomalies that are caused by real-world performance bugs, our approach achieves 95-100% precision and 87-100% recall, while the baselines achieve 49-83% precision and 100% recall. The obtained results show that our approach outperforms the existing anomaly prediction approaches and is able to predict performance anomalies in real-world systems.