Failure Detection in Large-Scale Internet Services by Principal Subspace Mapping

Fast and accurate failure detection is becoming essential in managing large-scale Internet services. This paper proposes a novel detection approach based on the subspace mapping between the system inputs and internal measurements. By exploring these contextual dependencies, our detector can initiate repair actions accurately, increasing the availability of the system. Although a classical statistical method, the canonical correlation analysis (CCA), is presented in the paper to achieve subspace mapping, we also propose a more advanced technique, the principal canonical correlation analysis (PCCA), to improve the performance of the CCA-based detector. PCCA extracts a principal subspace from internal measurements that is not only highly correlated with the inputs but also a significant representative of the original measurements. Experimental results on a Java 2 platform, enterprise edition (J2EE)- based Web application demonstrate that such property of PCCA is especially beneficial to failure detection tasks.