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Friday, July 8, 2016

Performance Problem Diagnosis in Cloud Infrastructures

I have been notified by RG about new reference to my paper "Capturing Workload Pathology by Statistical Exception Detection System". The following interesting tithes referenced my work:


by
 UmeĆ„ University

Abstract
Cloud datacenters comprise hundreds or thousands of disparate application services, each having stringent performance and availability requirements, sharing a finite set of heterogeneous hardware and software resources. The implication of such complex environment is that the occurrence of performance problems, such as slow application response and unplanned downtimes, has become a norm rather than exception resulting in decreased revenue, damaged reputation, and huge human-effort in diagnosis. Though causes can be as varied as application issues (e.g. bugs), machine-level failures (e.g. faulty server), and operator errors (e.g. mis-configurations), recent studies have attributed capacity-related issues, such as resource shortage and contention, as the cause of most performance problems on the Internet today. As cloud datacenters become increasingly autonomous there is need for automated performance diagnosis systems that can adapt their operation to reflect the changing workload and topology in the infrastructure. In particular, such systems should be able to detect anomalous performance events, uncover manifestations of capacity bottlenecks, localize actual root-cause(s), and possibly suggest or actuate corrections.
This thesis investigates approaches for diagnosing performance problems in cloud infrastructures. We present the outcome of an extensive survey of existing research contributions addressing performance diagnosis in diverse systems domains. We also present models and algorithms for detecting anomalies in real-time application performance and identification of anomalous datacenter resources based on operational metrics and spatial dependency across datacenter components. Empirical evaluations of our approaches shows how they can be used to improve end-user experience, service assurance and support root-cause analysis.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Scryer: Netflix’s Predictive Auto Scaling Engine (repost with my comment)


This type of pattern is not a big deal to predict, unfortunately we usually have to deal with much more noisier data...  applying SETDS methodology successfully.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

VMware uses Cloud Infrastructure Anomalies and Trends Detection Approaches

I have a few posts related to Mazada Marvasti work, for instance:

CMG'09: Performance Data Statistical Exceptions Analysis 


I actually still use time to time the product which is based on his work (former Alive tool) and I see also that he has been publishing recently a lot of papers and patents. The following paper from VMware published on RG has a long list of references to his work. That is very interesting and I should look at them more closely. Interesting that the paper declares that Mazda's anomaly and trend detection technique now are used for a cloud based infrastructure! 

 

 

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

This blog on the Blogger. What about other blogging platforms?

I have started exploring other blogging platforms. See the two first posts about it:

- Blogger:     The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
- WordPress: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly


Thursday, April 28, 2016

Me explaining the many dimensions of my data cube...


Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Neural Network in simple words

"This both confuses what a neural network actual is, and makes some people question their merits because they expect them to act like brains, when they are really a fancy type of function.
The best way to understand a neural net is to move past the name. Don't think of it as a model of a brain... its not... this was the intention in the 1960s but its 2011 and they are used all the time for machine learning and classification.
A neural network is actually just a mathematical function. You enter a vector of values, those values get multiplied by other values, and a value or vector of values is output. That is all it is.
They are very useful in problem domains where there is no known function for approximating the given features (or inputs) to their outputs (classification or regression). One example would be the weather - there are lots of features to the weather - type, temperature, movement, cloud cover, past events, etc - but nobody can say exactly how to calculate what the weather will be 2 days from now. A neural network is a function that is structured in a way that makes it easy to alter its parameters to approximate weather predication based on features.
Thats the thing... its a function and has a nice structure suited to "learning". One would take the past five years of weather data - complete with the features of the weather and the condition of the weather 2 days in the future, for every day in the past five years. The network weights (multiplying factors which reside in the edges) are generated randomly, and the data is run through. For each prediction, the NN will output values that are incorrect. Using a learning algorithm based in calculus, such as back-propogation, one can use the output error values to update all the weights in the network. After enough runs through the data, the error levels will reach some lowest point (there is more to that, but I won't get into it here - most important is over fitting). The goal is to stop the learning algorithm when error levels are at a best point. The network is then fixed and at this point it is just a mathematical function that maps input values into output values just like any old equation. You feed new data in and trust that the output values are a good approximation.
To those who claim they are failed: they aren't. They are extremely useful in many domains. How do you think researchers figure out correlations between genes and diseases? NNs, as well as other learning algorithms, are used in bioinformatics and other areas. They have been shown to produce extremely good results. NASA now uses them for space station routines, like predicting battery life. Some people will say that support vector machines, etc are better... but there is no evidence of that, other algorithms are just newer.
It is really too bad people still make this claim that neural networks are failed because they are much simpler than the human brain --- neural networks are no longer used to model brains --- that was 50 years ago. .."

Source - http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/72093/what-is-a-neural-network-in-simple-words 

Monday, April 18, 2016

Registration Open for imPACt 2016!

Registration Open for imPACt 2016!
 

The premier international event designed for and by performance and capacity professionals
Registration is Now Open!

Join us in La Jolla, CA this November for three-and-a-half days of education, networking and professional development. Find the insight you need for the latest technological developments all in one place. CMG imPACt 2016 will cover a wide range of topics including: 

Analysis & ReportingPerformance & Capacity
Internet of ThingsCyber Security
Cloud TechnologyBig Data
SystemZMobile


Click here for a full list of subject areas or to submit a paper!
Computer Measurement Group (CMG) | 856.401.1700 
Get Social:
Computer Measurement Group, 3501 Route 42 Suite 130 #121, Turnersville, nbsp;NJ 08012-1734
Sent by cmghq@cmg.org in collaboration with
Constant Contact

Call for Post

Your are welcome to post to this blog any message related to the Capacity, Performance and/or Availability of computer systems. Just put your proposed post as a comment for this post below and we will consider to move that to a regular post. Thanks!

Thursday, April 14, 2016

CMG imPACt 2016


Monday, March 28, 2016

The Challenge of Monitoring Containers at Scale

The adoption of containers, and the associated desire to build microservices, is causing a paradigm shift within the monitoring space. Application functionality is becoming more granular and more independently scalable and resilient, which is a challenge for traditional monitoring solutions. InfoQ recently sat down with a series of container monitoring experts and explored these challenges.
The Challenge of Monitoring Containers at Scale




See what relates to this blog :



#Cloud of #containers, #dockers and #microservices requires Management by Exception

From "The Challenge of Monitoring Containers at Scale"

...."Monitoring systems generally rely on the operator to define ‘normal’. With the rate of change in today’s dynamic environments being driven by auto-scaling and scheduled infrastructures, defining normality becomes a challenge. So far the monitoring community has done a great job of focusing on automating metrics collection and alerting on those predefined thresholds. We now need to focus on algorithmically detecting faults or anomalies and alerting on them"

...."key requirement is anomaly detection. Due to the massive scale nobody can look at all these numbers manually. So monitoring systems have to learn normal behaviour and indicate when system behaviour is not normal any more.

#CMG is in the development of performance engineering certifications (partnering with ASTQB)



News about software testing, software testers and certification
ASTQB and CMG Partner to Develop Performance Testing Certifications

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) has entered into a partnership agreement with the American Software Testing Qualifications Board (ASTQB) to contribute towards the development of performance testing certifications.
ASTQB President Debra Friedenberg stated, “We’re delighted to have an industry leading organization whose mission it is to evaluate system performance be committed to this endeavor. CMG is recognized for their breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise in performance evaluation.”
“This partnership provides CMG the expertise that ASTQB brings in developing full lifecycle certification programs that will aid CMG in the development of complementary performance engineering certifications,” stated CMG President Kevin Mobley.
Please submit any questions to headquarters@astqb.org.
....

Thursday, March 24, 2016

#CMGimPACt is a new name for #CMG'16 conference. I go! You?


 



Computer Measurement Group (CMG) strives to host an event that truly encompasses the
impact YOU make! Which is why we took your advice and re‐freshed the Performance and
Capacity annual conference. Along with a new name, imPACt 2016 will provide a wider range of
the topics you want to hear! Find more information here http://bit.ly/1pA1Zfx

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Our 1st Product - the mobile app for Android - is on Google Play for testing

The test version of the Collabrodor app has launched. If you have a pet, please install the app on Android and test! LINK IS HERE:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.ionicframework.wagg942308

Monday, February 29, 2016

SETDS is "machine learning"

Source: https://iot.ghost.io/is-it-all-machine-learning/
Is the SETDS data science type?

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Public Clouds Comparisons

I continue testing different public clouds. Check my first post on this topic below: 


My next test (AZURE) is published HERE where you also can find a very good blog post of "Comparing Cloud Compute Services" from CloudHarmony



Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Azure vs. AWS

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

"The Challenge of Fairly Comparing Cloud Providers and What We're Doing About It" and "Benchmarking the Cloud" CMG'15 session

UPDATE: check the next post for this topic here:

 



This video presentation is very similar with CMG'15 presentation I have attended: "Benchmarking the Cloud" by  Eric Hankland (Google, USA)

Abstract: The Google Cloud Performance team is responsible for the competitive analysis of Google Cloud products. This talk will cover the problems the team faces benchmarking Google Cloud Platform, some of the solutions we adopted, as well as two of our tools.

Interesting that the CMG presentation also provided some interesting benchmaring for other public cloud providers including
- www.rackspace.com (price starts frpm 3 c/hour for LAMP stack instance)
- www.DigitalOcean.com (price starts with $5 a month)
- and some others

Thursday, December 3, 2015

The Difference Between Microsoft Azure & Amazon AWS


Wednesday, December 2, 2015

"#cloud service providers aren’t motivated to help businesses save money on their services"

"... cloud service providers aren’t motivated to help businesses save money on their services. If businesses using the cloud are reacting to problems, instead of proactively avoiding them through good planning, then they’re more likely to spend the extra money on last-minute solutions..."
I have just ran into this very interesting point of view on the Capacity Planning for cloud based IT expressed by two major Capacity Management tools vendors (TeamQuest and Fluke Networks - I have used their tools in the past).

Thursday, November 12, 2015

New Orleans Jazz Music in San Antonio at #CMG2015 final resection. # 4

I have really enjoyed the CMG'15 conference! I will do my best to make it even better next year!
CMG'16La Jolla, CANov 7th - 10th, 2016


See you all there!

Thursday, November 5, 2015

#cmg2015 - Interviewing tips from Performance Dynamics

R. Jain talk at CMG - SDN, IoT, FCAPS, Fog computing, MCAD

http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/talks/apf_cmg.htm

Monday, November 2, 2015

"Linking Mainframe Monitoring, Anomaly Classification and Deep Analysis to Prevent Problem Reoccurrence" #CMG2015 - plan to attand

ABSTRACT:
"Mainframe monitoring does a great job of collecting and displaying system performance data. However in today's market monitoring is not enough - companies need accurate alerts, especially to handle issues arising from new mainframe usage paradigms driven by real-time end-user transaction systems and not just traditional backend transaction and batch processing. Also, many people with mainframe problem analysis skills are retiring making it harder to find people that can analyze mainframe monitor data for triage and problem resolution.This requires augmenting monitors with a "brain" " capable of accurate anomaly classification and alerts, and tying those alerts to deep dive activation - sense-and-respond can evolve into more a powerful mode of monitoring automation that we call predict-and-prevent. In this talk I'll discuss the capabilities needed by such a brain, which makes it possible to decide which anomalies are important and warrant a response, which need to be watched more closely to gather more information and which can be ignored.


Jacob P. Ukelson, D.Sc.

ConicIT

Does your data have anomalies? #CMG2015

Check out @anoushnajarian's Tweet: about   workshope - https://twitter.com/anoushnajarian/status/661211860742615041?s=09