On the effectiveness of isolation-based anomaly detection in cloud data centers

The high volume of monitoring information generated by large-scale cloud infrastructures poses a challenge to the capacity of cloud providers in detecting anomalies in the infrastructure. Traditional anomaly detection methods are resource-intensive and computationally complex for training and/or detection, what is undesirable in very dynamic and large-scale environment such as clouds. Isolation-based methods have the advantage of low complexity for training and detection and are optimized for detecting failures. In this work, we explore the feasibility of Isolation Forest, an isolation-based anomaly detection method, to detect anomalies in large-scale cloud data centers. We propose a method to code time-series information as extra attributes that enable temporal anomaly detection and establish its feasibility to adapt to seasonality and trends in the time-series and to be applied online and in real-time.