A Resource Contention Analysis Framework for Diagnosis of Application Performance Anomalies in Consolidated Cloud Environments.

Cloud services have made large contributions to the agile developments and rapid revisions of various applications. However, the performance of these applications is still one of the largest concerns for developers. Although it has created many performance analysis frameworks, most of them have not been efficient for the rapid application revisions because they have required performance models, which may have had to be remodeled whenever application revisions occurred. We propose an analysis framework for diagnosis of application performance anomalies. We designed our framework so that it did not require any performance models to be efficient in rapid application revisions. That investigates the Pearson correlation and association rules between system metrics and application performance. The association rules are widely used in data-mining areas to find relations between variables in databases. We demonstrated through an experiment and testing on a real data set that our framework could select causal metrics even when the metrics were temporally correlated, which reduced the false negatives obtained from cause diagnosis. We evaluated our framework from the perspective of the expected remaining diagnostic costs of framework users. The results indicated that it was expected to reduce the diagnostic costs by 84.8\% at most, compared with a method that only used the Pearson correlation.