DeCaf: Diagnosing and Triaging Performance Issues in Large-Scale Cloud Services

Large scale cloud services use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for tracking and monitoring performance. They usually have Service Level Objectives (SLOs) baked into the customer agreements which are tied to these KPIs. Dependency failures, code bugs, infrastructure failures, and other problems can cause performance regressions. It is critical to minimize the time and manual effort in diagnosing and triaging such issues to reduce customer impact. Large volume of logs and mixed type of attributes (categorical, continuous) in the logs makes diagnosis of regressions non-trivial.

In this paper, we present the design, implementation and experience from building and deploying DeCaf, a system for automated diagnosis and triaging of KPI issues using service logs. It uses machine learning along with pattern mining to help service owners automatically root cause and triage performance issues. We present the learnings and results from case studies on two large scale cloud services in Microsoft where DeCaf successfully diagnosed 10 known and 31 unknown issues. DeCaf also automatically triages the identified issues by leveraging historical data. Our key insights are that for any such diagnosis tool to be effective in practice, it should a) scale to large volumes of service logs and attributes, b) support different types of KPIs and ranking functions, c) be integrated into the DevOps processes.