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

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. Predicting the future progress of those KPIs allows ahead of time optimizations like anomaly detection or predictive maintenance and can be defined as a time series forecasting problem. 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 modelled 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 forecasting. 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.