Monitoring the network monitoring system: Anomaly Detection using pattern recognition

For a successful and efficient network supervision, an Anomaly Detection System is essential. In this paper, our goal is to develop a simple, practical, and application-domain specific approach to identify anomalies in the input/output data of network probes. Since data are periodic and continuously evolving, it is not possible to use threshold-based approaches. We propose an algorithm based on pattern recognition to help mobile operators detect anomalies in real time. The algorithm is unsupervised and easily configurable with a small number of tuning parameters. After weeks of deployment in a production network monitoring system, we obtain satisfactory results: we detect major anomalies with low error rate.