Superiority of Simplicity: A Lightweight Model for Network Device Workload Prediction

2020/07/07 by Alexander Acker, Thorsten Wittkopp, Acker, Alexander +7
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Data Stream Mining Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Software System Performance and Reliability #Stock Market Forecasting Methods #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.03568

openalex publication_date 2020/07/07 · openalex created_date 2020/07/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The rapid growth and distribution of IT systems increases their complexity and aggravates operation and maintenance. To sustain control over large sets of hosts and the connecting networks, monitoring solutions are employed and constantly enhanced. They collect diverse key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g. CPU utilization, allocated memory, etc.) and provide detailed information about the system state. Storing such metrics over a period of time naturally raises the motivation of predicting future KPI progress based on past observations. Although, a variety of time series forecasting methods exist, forecasting the progress of IT system KPIs is very hard. First, KPI types like CPU utilization or allocated memory are very different and hard to be expressed by the same model. Second, system components are interconnected and constantly changing due to soft- or firmware updates and hardware modernization. Thus a frequent model retraining or fine-tuning must be expected. Therefore, we propose a lightweight solution for KPI series prediction based on historic observations. It consists of a weighted heterogeneous ensemble method composed of two models - a neural network and a mean predictor. As ensemble method a weighted summation is used, whereby a heuristic is employed to set the weights. The modelling approach is evaluated on the available FedCSIS 2020 challenge dataset and achieves an overall R² score of 0.10 on the preliminary 10% test data and 0.15 on the complete test data. We publish our code on the following github repository: https://github.com/citlab/fed_challenge

Related

• Time Series Network Utilization KPI Forecasting Using Advanced AI/ML Models
• HigeNet: A Highly Efficient Modeling for Long Sequence Time Series Prediction in AIOps
• PePNet: A Periodicity-Perceived Workload Prediction Network Supporting Rare Occurrence of Heavy Workload
• Time-Series Foundation Models for ISP Traffic Forecasting
• A Novel Prediction Setup for Online Speed-Scaling