Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems that employ distributed-computer-system metrics collected by one or more distributed-computer-system metrics-collection services, call traces collected by one or more call-trace services, and attribute values for distributed-computer-system components to identify attribute dimensions related to anomalous behavior of distributed-computer-system components. In a described implementation, nodes correspond to particular types of system components and node instances are individual components of the component type corresponding to a node. Node instances are associated with attribute values and node are associated with attribute-value spaces defined by attribute dimensions. A set of call traces is partitioned, by clustering.

Abstract: Automated computational methods and systems to classify and troubleshoot problems in information technology (“IT”) systems or services provided by a distributed computing system are described. Each IT system of the distribution computing system or IT service provided by the distributed computing system has an associated key performance indicator (“KPI”) used to monitor performance of the IT system or service. When real-time KPI data violates a KPI threshold, a real-time event-type distribution is computed from event messages generated by event sources associated with the IT system or service following the threshold violation. The real-time event-type distribution is compared with historical event-type distributions recorded for the KPI data in order to identify the problem and execute remedial action to resolve the problem.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems that employ call traces collected by one or more call-trace services to generate call-trace-classification rules to facilitate root-cause analysis of distributed-application operational problems and failures. In a described implementation, a set of automatically labeled call traces is partitioned by the generated call-trace-classification rules. Call-trace-classification-rule generation is constrained to produce relatively simple rules with greater-than-threshold confidences and coverages. The call-trace-classification rules may point to particular services and service failures, which provides useful information to distributed-application and distributed-computer-system managers and administrators attempting to diagnose operational problems and failures that arise during execution of distributed applications within distributed computer systems.

Abstract: Methods and systems described herein automate troubleshooting a problem in execution of an application in a distributed computing. Methods and systems learn interesting patterns in problem instances over time. The problem instances are displayed in a graphical user interface (“GUI”) that enables a user to assign a problem type label to each historical problem instance. A machine learning model is trained to predict problem types in executing the application based on the historical problem instances and associated problem types. In response to detecting a run-time problem instance in the execution of the application. the machine learning model is used to determine one or more problem types associated with the run-time problem instance. The one or more problem types are rank-ordered and a recommendation may be generated to correct the run-time problem instance based on the highest ranked problem type.

Abstract: Methods and systems described herein automate various aspects of troubleshooting a problem in a distributed computing system for various forms of object information regarding objects of the distributed computing system. In one aspect, the object information includes metrics, log messages, properties, network flows, events, and application traces. Methods and systems learn interesting patterns contained in the object information. The interesting patterns include change points in metrics and network flows, changes in the types of log messages, broken correlations between events, anomalous event transactions, atypical histogram distributions of metrics, and atypical histogram distributions of span durations in application traces. The interesting patterns are displayed in a graphical user interface (“GUI”) that enables a user to assign a label identifying a problem associated with the interesting patterns.

Abstract: Automated methods and systems to determine a baseline event-type distribution of an event source and use the baseline event type distribution to detect changes in the behavior of the event source are described. In one implementation, blocks of event messages generated by the event source are collected and an event-type distribution is computed for each of block of event messages. Candidate baseline event-type distributions are determined from the event-type distributions. The candidate baseline event-type distribution has the largest entropy of the event-type distributions. A normal discrepancy radius of the event-type distributions is computed from the baseline event-type distribution and the event-type distributions. A block of run-time event messages generated by the event source is collected. A run-time event-type distribution is computed from the block of run-time event messages.

Abstract: Methods and systems described herein are directed to troubleshooting anomalous behavior in a data center. Anomalous behavior in an object of a data center, such as a computational resource, an application, or a virtual machine (“VM”), may be related to the behavior of other objects at different hierarchies of the data center. Methods and systems provide a graphical user interface that enables a user to select a selected metric associated with an object of the data center experiencing a performance problem. Unexpected metrics of an object topology of the data center that correspond to the performance problem are identified. A recommendation for executing remedial measures to correct the performance problem is generated based on the unexpected metrics.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems that employ distributed-computer-system metrics collected by one or more distributed-computer-system metrics-collection services, call traces collected by one or more call-trace services, and attribute values for distributed-computer-system components to identify attribute dimensions related to anomalous behavior of distributed-computer-system components. In a described implementation, nodes correspond to particular types of system components and node instances are individual components of the component type corresponding to a node. Node instances are associated with attribute values and node are associated with attribute-value spaces defined by attribute dimensions.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems that employ distributed-computer-system metrics collected by one or more distributed-computer-system metrics-collection services, call traces collected by one or more call-trace services, and attribute values for distributed-computer-system components to identify attribute dimensions related to anomalous behavior of distributed-computer-system components. In a described implementation, nodes correspond to particular types of system components and node instances are individual components of the component type corresponding to a node. Node instances are associated with attribute values and node are associated with attribute-value spaces defined by attribute dimensions. A set of call traces is partitioned, by clustering.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems that employ distributed-computer-system metrics collected by one or more distributed-computer-system metrics-collection services, call traces collected by one or more call-trace services, and attribute values for distributed-computer-system components to identify attribute dimensions related to anomalous behavior of distributed-computer-system components. In a described implementation, nodes correspond to particular types of system components and node instances are individual components of the component type corresponding to a node. Node instances are associated with attribute values and node are associated with attribute-value spaces defined by attribute dimensions.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems that generate forecasts based on input time-series data using a forecasting neural network or other machine-learning-based forecasting subsystem. In various implementations, an input time series is first classified and then transformed, based on the classification, to a corresponding stationary time series. The corresponding stationary time series is then submitted to a neural network or other machine-learning-based forecasting subsystem to generate an initial forecast for future time points. The initial forecast is then inverse transformed, based on the input-time-series classification, to generate a final, output forecast.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems that generate forecasts based on input time-series data using a forecasting neural network or other machine-learning-based forecasting subsystem. In various implementations, an input time series is first classified and then transformed, based on the classification, to a corresponding stationary time series. The corresponding stationary time series is then submitted to a neural network or other machine-learning-based forecasting subsystem to generate an initial forecast for future time points. The initial forecast is then inverse transformed, based on the input-time-series classification, to generate a final, output forecast.

Abstract: Methods and systems described herein are directed to troubleshooting anomalous behavior in a data center. Anomalous behavior in an object of a data center, such as a computational resource, an application, or a virtual machine (“VM”), may be related to the behavior of other objects at different hierarchies of the data center. Methods and systems provide a graphical user interface that enables a user to select a selected metric associated with an object of the data center experiencing a performance problem. Unexpected metrics of an object topology of the data center that correspond to the performance problem are identified. A recommendation for executing remedial measures to correct the performance problem is generated based on the unexpected metrics.

Abstract: The current document is directed to improved system monitoring and management tools and methods based on generation an anomaly signal from time-series data collected from components of a computer system, providing improved system monitoring and management. The time series data comprises a time-ordered sequence of metric datapoints that is received over a period of time. At each of a set of discrete, successive time points within the period of time, a datapoint for the anomaly signal is generated from a forecast generated from a preceding set of time-series datapoints, referred to as a “history window,” and a short segment of the time series, referred to as the “observation window,” extending forward in time from the most recently datapoint in the history window. The anomaly signal predicts incipient anomalous conditions in the computer system.

Abstract: Methods and systems are directed to finding various types of evidence of performance problems with objects in a data center, troubleshooting the performance problems, and generating recommendations for correcting the performance problems. A performance problem with an object of a data center, such as a server computer, an application, or a virtual machine (“VM”), may result from performance problems associated with other objects of the data center. The methods and systems detect origins of performance problems with objects for which no alerts and parameters for detecting the performance problems have been defined or detect performance problems related to alerts that fail to point to a root cause of the performance problem.

Abstract: Computational processes and systems are directed to detecting abnormally behaving objects of a distributed computing system. An object can be a physical or a virtual object, such as a server computer, application, VM, virtual network device, or container. Processes and systems identify a set of metrics associated with an object and compute an indicator metric from the set of metrics. The indicator metric is used to label time stamps that correspond to outlier metric values of the set of metrics. The metrics and outlier time stamps are used to compute rules by machine learning. Each rule corresponds to a subset or combination of metrics and represents specific threshold conditions for metric values. The rules are applied to run-time metric data of the metrics to detect run-time abnormal behavior of the object.

Abstract: Methods and systems that estimate a degree of abnormality of a complex system based on historical time-series data representative of the complex system's past behavior and using the historical degree of abnormality to determine whether or not a degree of abnormality determined from current time-series data representative of the same complex system's current behavior is worthy of attention. The time-series data may be metric data that represents behavior of a complex system as a result of successive measurements of the complex system made over time or in a time interval. A degree of abnormality represents the amount by which the time-series data violates a threshold. The larger the degree of abnormality of the current time-series data is from the historical degree of abnormality, the larger the violation of the thresholds and the greater the probability the violation in the current time-series data is worthy of attention.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and subsystems within computing systems, including distributed computing systems, that collect, store, process, and analyze population metrics for types and classes of system components, including components of distributed applications executing within containers, virtual machines, and other execution environments. In a described implementation, a graph-like representation of the configuration and state of a computer system included aggregation nodes that collect metric data for a set of multiple object nodes and that collect metric data that represents the members of the set over a monitoring time interval. Population metrics are monitored, in certain implementations, to detect outlier members of an aggregation.

Abstract: Computational processes and systems are directed to forecasting time series data and detection of anomalous behaving resources of a distributed computing system data. Processes and systems comprise off-line and on-line modes that accelerate the forecasting process and identification of anomalous behaving resources. In the off-line mode, recurrent neural network (“RNN”) is continuously trained using time series data associated with various resources of the distributed computing system. In the on-line mode, the latest RNN is used to forecast time series data for resources in a forecast time window and confidence bounds are computed over the forecast time window. The forecast time series data characterizes expected resource usage over the forecast time window so that usage of the resource may be adjusted. The confidence bounds may be used to detect anomalous behaving resources. Remedial measures may then be executed to correct problems indicated by the anomalous behavior.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems for detecting the occurrences of abnormal events and operational behaviors within the distributed computer system. The currently described methods and systems continuously collect metric data from various metric-data sources, generate a sequence of metric-data observations, each metric-data observation comprising a set of temporally aligned metric data, and employ principle-component analysis to transform the metric-data observations to facilitate reduction of the dimensionality of the metric-data observations.