An Anomaly Detection Framework Based on ICA and Bayesian Classification for IaaS Platforms

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) encapsulates computer hardware into a large amount of virtual and manageable instances mainly in the form of virtual machine (VM), and provides rental service for users. Currently, VM anomaly incidents occasionally occur, which leads to performance issues and even downtime. This paper aims at detecting anomalous VMs based on performance metrics data of VMs. Due to the dynamic nature and increasing scale of IaaS, detecting anomalous VMs from voluminous correlated and non-Gaussian monitored performance data is a challenging task. This paper designs an anomaly detection framework to solve this challenge. First, it collects 53 performance metrics to reflect the running state of each VM. The collected performance metrics are testified not to follow the Gaussian distribution. Then, it employs independent components analysis (ICA) instead of principal component analysis (PCA) to extract independent components from collected non-Gaussian performance metric data. For anomaly detection, it employs multi-class Bayesian classification to determine the current state of each VM. To evaluate the performance of the designed detection framework, four types of anomalies are separately or jointly injected into randomly selected VMs in a campus-wide testbed. The experimental results show that ICA-based detection mechanism outperforms PCA-based and LDA-based detection mechanisms in terms of sensitivity and specificity.