Representation Learning for Resource Usage Prediction
This addresses the challenge of resource management for system administrators by moving beyond heuristic-based approaches, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ML techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting future resource usage and detecting anomalies in computer systems by integrating diverse systems telemetry into a machine learning model, achieving this through training recurrent neural networks as a proof of concept.
Creating a model of a computer system that can be used for tasks such as predicting future resource usage and detecting anomalies is a challenging problem. Most current systems rely on heuristics and overly simplistic assumptions about the workloads and system statistics. These heuristics are typically a one-size-fits-all solution so as to be applicable in a wide range of applications and systems environments. With this paper, we present our ongoing work of integrating systems telemetry ranging from standard resource usage statistics to kernel and library calls of applications into a machine learning model. Intuitively, such a ML model approximates, at any point in time, the state of a system and allows us to solve tasks such as resource usage prediction and anomaly detection. To achieve this goal, we leverage readily-available information that does not require any changes to the applications run on the system. We train recurrent neural networks to learn a model of the system under consideration. As a proof of concept, we train models specifically to predict future resource usage of running applications.