Fault detection for cloud computing systems with correlation analysis

The large-scale dynamic cloud computing environment has raised great challenges for fault diagnosis in Web applications. First, fluctuating workloads cause traditional application models to change over time. Moreover, modeling the behaviors of complex applications always requires domain knowledge which is difficult to obtain. Finally, managing large-scale applications manually is impractical for operators. This paper addresses these issues and proposes an automatic fault diagnosis method for Web applications in cloud computing. We propose an online incremental clustering method to recognize access behavior patterns, and uses CCA to model the correlation between workloads and the metrics of application performance/resource utilization in a specific access behavior pattern. Our method detects anomalies by discovering the abrupt change of correlation coefficients with a EWMA control chart, and then locates suspicious metrics using a feature selection method combining ReliefF and SVM-RFE. We validate our method by injecting typical faults in TPC-W an industry-standard benchmark, and the experimental results demonstrate that it can effectively detect typical faults.