Detecting Application-Level Failures in Component-based Internet Services

etc.) suffer faults. Quickly detecting these faults can be the largest bottleneck in improving availability of the system. We present Pinpoint, a methodology for automating fault detection in Internet services by (1) observing low-level, internal structural behaviors of the service; (2) modeling the majority behavior of the system as correct; and (3) detecting anomalies in these behaviors as possible symptoms of failures. Without requiring any a priori application-specific information, Pinpoint correctly detected 89– 96 % of major failures in our experiments, as compared with 20–70 % detected by current application-generic techniques. Index Terms — Internet services, application-level failures, anomaly detection I