Anomaly Diagnosis with Siamese Discrepancy Networks in Distributed Cloud Databases

Anomaly diagnosis is a fundamental problem in operation and maintenance of distributed cloud databases. Existing deep learning based methods solve this problem by classifying the anomalies with different root causes. However, since anomalies seldom occur, and anomalies with the same root cause may exhibit significantly different behaviors across different cloud database clusters, existing methods often lack sufficient training data, and they cannot generalize well from some clusters to others. Therefore, we take both anomaly and normal data into consideration, based on an observation that the discrepancy between the anomaly and normal data is relatively consistent compared to the behaviours of anomalies themselves. We design a Siamese Discrepancy Network (SDN) to learn representations of such discrepancy under the case that only a small amount of training data is available. In addition, a discrepancy-based diagnosis paradigm is proposed to construct training data for SDN and diagnose based on representations of discrepancy learned by SDN. Finally, we develop an anomaly interpretation method based on SDN, which accurately locates the symptom KPIs and root cause KPIs. Extensive experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods with respect to anomaly diagnosis and anomaly interpretation. In particular, the anomaly diagnosis framework has already been applied in Huawei's GaussDB (DWS) system.