Kahuna: Problem diagnosis for Mapreduce-based cloud computing environments

Abstract

We present Kahuna, an approach that aims to diagnose performance problems in MapReduce systems. Central to Kahuna's approach is our insight on peer-similarity, that nodes behave alike in the absence of performance problems, and that a node that behaves differently is the likely culprit of a performance problem. We present applications of Kahuna's insight in techniques and their algorithms to statistically compare black-box (OS-level performance metrics) and white-box (Hadoop-log statistics) data across the different nodes of a MapReduce cluster, in order to identify the faulty node(s). We also present empirical evidence of our peer-similarity observations from the 4000-processor Yahoo! M45 Hadoop cluster. In addition, we demonstrate Kahuna's effectiveness through experimental evaluation of two algorithms for a number of reported performance problems, on four different workloads in a 100-node Hadoop cluster running on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure.