AutoDiagn: An Automated Real-Time Diagnosis Framework for Big Data Systems

Big data processing systems, such as Hadoop and Spark, usually work in large-scale, highly-concurrent, and multi-tenant environments that can easily cause hardware and software malfunctions or failures, thereby leading to performance degradation. Several systems and methods exist to detect big data processing systems’ performance degradation, perform root-cause analysis, and even overcome the issues causing such degradation. However, these solutions focus on specific problems such as stragglers and inefficient resource utilization. There is a lack of a generic and extensible framework to support the real-time diagnosis of big data systems. In this article, we propose, develop and validate AutoDiagn. This generic and flexible framework provides holistic monitoring of a big data system while detecting performance degradation and enabling root-cause analysis. We present an implementation and evaluation of AutoDiagn that interacts with a Hadoop cluster deployed on a public cloud and tested with real-world benchmark applications. Experimental results show that AutoDiagn can offer a high accuracy root-cause analysis framework, at the same time as offering a small resource footprint, high throughput, and low latency.