Quantifying Temporal and Spatial Correlation of Failure Events for Proactive Management

Networked computing systems continue to grow in scale and in the complexity of their components and interactions. Component failures become norms instead of exceptions in these environments. Moreover, failure events exhibit strong correlations in time and space domain. In this paper, we develop a spherical covariance model with an adjustable timescale parameter to quantify the temporal correlation and a stochastic model to characterize spatial correlation. The models are further extended to take into account the information of application allocation to discover more correlations among failure instances. We cluster failure events based on their correlations and predict their future occurrences. Experimental results on a production coalition system, the Wayne State Grid, show the offline and online predictions by our predicting system can forecast 72.7% to 85.3% of the failure occurrences and capture failure correlations in cluster coalition environment.