Machine Learning in the Monitoring of Computer Clusters

With the explosion of the number of distributed applications, a new dynamic server environment emerged grouping servers into clusters, whose utilization depends on the cur- rent demand for the application. Detecting and fixing erratic server behavior is paramount for providing maximal service stability and availability. Using standard techniques to de- tect such behavior is yielding sub-optimal results. We have collected a dataset of OS-level performance metrics from a cluster running a streaming distributed application and in- jected artificially created anomalies. We then selected a set of various machine learning algorithms and trained them for anomaly detection on said dataset. We evaluated the algorithms performance and proposed a system for generating notifications of possible erratic behavior, based on the analysis of the best performing algorithm.