A Lightweight Tool for Anomaly Detection in Cloud Data Centres

Sakil Barbhuiya, Zafeirios Papazachos, Peter Kilpatrick, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos

2015

Abstract

Cloud data centres are critical business infrastructures and the fastest growing service providers. Detecting anomalies in Cloud data centre operation is vital. Given the vast complexity of the data centre system software stack, applications and workloads, anomaly detection is a challenging endeavour. Current tools for detecting anomalies often use machine learning techniques, application instance behaviours or system metrics distribution, which are complex to implement in Cloud computing environments as they require training, access to application-level data and complex processing. This paper presents LADT, a lightweight anomaly detection tool for Cloud data centres that uses rigorous correlation of system metrics, implemented by an efficient correlation algorithm without need for training or complex infrastructure set up. LADT is based on the hypothesis that, in an anomaly-free system, metrics from data centre host nodes and virtual machines (VMs) are strongly correlated. An anomaly is detected whenever correlation drops below a threshold value. We demonstrate and evaluate LADT using a Cloud environment, where it shows that the hosting node I/O operations per second (IOPS) are strongly correlated with the aggregated virtual machine IOPS, but this correlation vanishes when an application stresses the disk, indicating a node-level anomaly.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Barbhuiya S., Papazachos Z., Kilpatrick P. and S. Nikolopoulos D. (2015). A Lightweight Tool for Anomaly Detection in Cloud Data Centres . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER, ISBN 978-989-758-104-5, pages 343-351. DOI: 10.5220/0005453403430351

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer15,
author={Sakil Barbhuiya and Zafeirios Papazachos and Peter Kilpatrick and Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos},
title={A Lightweight Tool for Anomaly Detection in Cloud Data Centres},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,},
year={2015},
pages={343-351},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005453403430351},
isbn={978-989-758-104-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,
TI - A Lightweight Tool for Anomaly Detection in Cloud Data Centres
SN - 978-989-758-104-5
AU - Barbhuiya S.
AU - Papazachos Z.
AU - Kilpatrick P.
AU - S. Nikolopoulos D.
PY - 2015
SP - 343
EP - 351
DO - 10.5220/0005453403430351