DAPA: Diagnosing Application Performance Anomalies for Virtualized Infrastructures

As cloud service providers leverage server virtualization to host applications in virtual machines (VMs), they must ensure proper allocation of resource capacities in order to satisfy the contracted service level agreements (SLAs) with the application owners. However, the ever-growing number of virtual and physical machines within such infrastructure creates greater challenges in quickly and effectively localizing the system bottlenecks that lead to SLA violations. This paper describes DAPA, a new performance diagnostic framework to help system administrators analyze application performance anomalies and identify potential causes of SLA violations. DAPA incorporates several customized statistical techniques to capture the quantitative relationship between the application performance and virtualized system metrics. We have built a prototype implementation of DAPA on a cluster of virtualized systems to diagnose a set of SLA violations for an enterprise application. Preliminary evaluation results show that DAPA is able to localize the most suspicious attributes of the virtual machines and physical hosts that are related to the SLA violations.