Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis of Microservices Energy Consumption

With the expansion of cloud computing and data centers, the need has arisen to tackle their environmental impact. The increasing adoption of microservice architectures, while offering scalability and flexibility, poses new challenges in the effective management of systems' energy consumption.This study analyzes experimentally the effectiveness, with respect to energy consumption, of algorithms for Anomaly Detection (AD) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for (containerized) microservices systems. The study analyzes five AD and three RCA algorithms. Metrics to assess the effectiveness of AD algorithms are Precision, Recall, and F-Score. For RCA algorithms, the chose metric is Precision at level k. Two subjects of different complexity are used: Sock Shop and UNI-Cloud. Experiments use a cross-over paired comparison design, involving multiple randomized runs for robust measures.The experiments show that AD algorithms exhibit a relatively moderate performance. The mean adjusted Precision for Sock Shop is 61.5%, while it is 75% for the best-performing algorithms (BIRCH, KNN, and SVM) on UNI-Cloud. The Recall and F-Score for UNI-Cloud, for the same algorithms, are 75%, while for Sock Shop KNN yields the best outcome at roughly 45%. MicroRCA and RCD emerge as the top-performing algorithms for RCA.We found that the effectiveness of AD algorithms is strongly influenced by anomaly thresholds, emphasizing the importance of careful tuning such algorithms. RCA algorithms reveal promising results, particularly RCD and MicroRCA, which showed robust performance. However, challenges remain, as seen with the epsilon-diagnosis algorithm, suggesting the need for further refinement.For DevOps engineers, the findings highlight the need to carefully select and tune AD and RCA algorithms for energy, and to take into account system topology and monitoring configurations.