Identifying Performance Issues in Cloud Service Systems Based on Relational-Temporal Features

Cloud systems, typically comprised of various components (e.g., microservices), are susceptible to performance issues, which may cause service-level agreement violations and financial losses. Identifying performance issues is thus of paramount importance for cloud vendors. In current practice, crucial metrics, i.e., key performance indicators (KPIs), are monitored periodically to provide insight into the operational status of components. Identifying performance issues is often formulated as an anomaly detection problem, which is tackled by analyzing each metric independently. However, this approach overlooks the complex dependencies existing among cloud components. Some graph neural network-based methods take both temporal and relational information into account, however, the correlation violations in the metrics that serve as indicators of underlying performance issues are difficult for them to identify. Furthermore, a large volume of components in a cloud system results in a vast array of noisy metrics. This complexity renders it impractical for engineers to fully comprehend the correlations, making it challenging to identify performance issues accurately. To address these limitations, we propose Identifying Performance Issues based on Relational-Temporal Features (ISOLATE ), a learning-based approach that leverages both the relational and temporal features of metrics to identify performance issues. In particular, it adopts a graph neural network with attention to characterizing the relations among metrics and extracts long-term and multi-scale temporal patterns using a GRU and a convolution network, respectively. The learned graph attention weights can be further used to localize the correlation-violated metrics. Moreover, to relieve the impact of noisy data, ISOLATE utilizes a positive unlabeled learning strategy that tags pseudo labels based on a small portion of confirmed negative examples. Extensive evaluation on both public and industrial datasets shows that ISOLATE outperforms all baseline models with 0.945 F1-score and 0.920 Hit rate@3. The ablation study also proves the effectiveness of the relational-temporal features and the PU-learning strategy. Furthermore, we share the success stories of leveraging ISOLATE to identify performance issues in Huawei Cloud, which demonstrates its superiority in practice.