Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used for fault diagnosis in microservice systems, but their true benefit is often conflated with that of complex preprocessing pipelines. To isolate the GNN's contribution, we propose DiagMLP, a minimal, topology-agnostic MLP baseline. We conduct an ablation study by replacing GNN modules with DiagMLP in existing state-of-the-art frameworks. Across five datasets, this simple baseline achieves performance parity with GNN-based methods in fault detection, localization, and classification. These findings challenge the assumption that GNNs are indispensable, suggesting their contribution is marginal and that performance is primarily driven by preprocessing that already encodes critical dependency information. Our work advocates for a systematic re-evaluation of model complexity and the adoption of rigorous baselines to validate future innovations.

To maintain the required service quality of time-critical cloud applications, operators must continuously monitor their runtime status, detect potential performance anomalies, and diagnose the root causes of these anomalies effectively. However, existing performance diagnosis methods face challenges such as the need for high-quality labeled data, the low reusability and robustness of performance anomaly detection models, and the absence of real-time fine-grained root cause localization. These challenges make fixing performance issues quickly and developing effective adaptation decisions difficult. We provide a Fine-grained Robust Performance Diagnosis (FIRED) framework to tackle those challenges. The framework offers a metrics selection component to filter noise and improve detection efficiency, an anomaly detection component that assembles several well-selected base models with a deep neural network, and adopts weakly supervised learning considering fewer labels exist in reality. The framework also employs a real-time, fine-grained root cause localization component to locate dependent resource metrics of performance anomalies. Our experiments show that the framework can effectively reduce data noise and achieve the best accuracy and algorithm robustness for performance anomaly detection. In addition, the framework can accurately localize the first root causes, with an average accuracy higher than 0.7 for locating the first four root cause metrics.

Ocean and climate research benefits from global ocean observation initiatives such as Argo, GLOSS, and EMSO. The Argo network, dedicated to ocean profiling, generates a vast volume of observatory data. However, data quality issues from sensor malfunctions and transmission errors necessitate stringent quality assessment. Existing methods, including machine learning, fall short due to limited labeled data and imbalanced datasets. To address these challenges, we propose an Outlier Detection-Enhanced Active Learning (ODEAL) framework for ocean data quality assessment, employing Active Learning (AL) to reduce human experts’ workload in the quality assessment workflow and leveraging outlier detection algorithms for effective model initialization. We also conduct extensive experiments on five large-scale realistic Argo datasets to gain insights into our proposed method, including the effectiveness of AL query strategies and the initial set construction approach. The results suggest that our framework enhances quality assessment efficiency by up to 465.5% with the uncertainty-based query strategy compared to random sampling and minimizes overall annotation costs by up to 76.9% using the initial set built with outlier detectors.

Effectively localizing root causes of performance anomalies is crucial to enabling the rapid recovery and loss mitigation of microservice applications in the cloud. Depending on the granularity of the causes that can be localized, a service operator may take different actions, e.g., restarting or migrating services if only faulty services can be localized (namely, coarse-grained) or scaling resources if specific indicative metrics on the faulty service can be localized (namely, fine-grained). Prior research mainly focuses on coarse-grained faulty service localization, and there is now a growing interest in fine-grained root cause localization to identify faulty services and metrics. Causal inference (CI) based methods have gained popularity recently for root cause localization, but currently used CI methods have limitations, such as the linear causal relations assumption and strict data distribution requirements. To tackle these challenges, we propose a framework named CausalRCA to implement fine-grained, automated, and real-time root cause localization. The CausalRCA uses a gradient-based causal structure learning method to generate weighted causal graphs and a root cause inference method to localize root cause metrics. We conduct coarse- and fine-grained root cause localization to evaluate the localization performance of CausalRCA. Experimental results show that CausalRCA has significantly outperformed baseline methods in localization accuracy, e.g., the average AC@3 of the fine-grained root cause metric localization in the faulty service is 0.719, and the average increase is 10% compared with baseline methods. In addition, the average Avg@5 has improved by 9.43%. Codes and data are open-sourced and can be found in our Github repository CausalRCA.

Workflow offloading in the edge-to-cloud continuum copes with an extended calculation network among edge devices and cloud platforms. With the growing significance of edge and cloud technologies, workflow offloading among these environments has been investigated in recent years. However, the dynamics of offloading optimization objectives, i.e., latency, resource utilization rate, and energy consumption among the edge and cloud sides, have hardly been researched. Consequently, the Quality of Service(QoS) and offloading performance also experience uncertain deviation. In this work, we propose a multi-objective robust offloading algorithm to address this issue, dealing with dynamics and multi-objective optimization. The workflow request model in this work is modeled as Directed Acyclic Graph(DAG). An LSTM-based sequence-to-sequence neural network learns the offloading policy. We then conduct comprehensive implementations to validate the robustness of our algorithm. As a result, our algorithm achieves better offloading performance regarding each objective and faster adaptation to newly changed environments than fine-tuned typical single-objective RL-based offloading methods.

Abstract Quality of data services is crucial for operational large-scale internet-of-things (IoT) research data infrastructure, in particular when serving large amounts of distributed users. Effectively detecting runtime anomalies and diagnosing their root cause helps to defend against adversarial attacks, thereby essentially boosting system security and robustness of the IoT infrastructure services. However, conventional anomaly detection methods are inadequate when facing the dynamic complexities of these systems. In contrast, supervised machine learning methods are unable to exploit large amounts of data due to the unavailability of labeled data. This paper leverages popular GAN-based generative models and end-to-end one-class classification to improve unsupervised anomaly detection. A novel heterogeneous BiGAN-based anomaly detection model Heterogeneous Temporal Anomaly-reconstruction GAN (HTA-GAN) is proposed to make better use of a one-class classifier and a novel anomaly scoring function. The Generator-Encoder-Discriminator BiGAN structure can lead to practical anomaly score computation and temporal feature capturing. We empirically compare the proposed approach with several state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods on real-world datasets, anomaly benchmarks and synthetic datasets. The results show that HTA-GAN outperforms its competitors and demonstrates better robustness.

The cover image is based on the Research Article Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): From private notebooks to a collaborative cloud virtual research environment by Zhiming Zhao et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3098.

Abstract Virtual research environments (VREs) provide user‐centric support in the lifecycle of research activities, for example, discovering and accessing research assets or composing and executing application workflows. A typical VRE is often implemented as an integrated environment, including a catalog of research assets, a workflow management system, a data management framework, and tools for enabling user collaboration. In contrast, notebook environments like Jupyter allow researchers to rapidly prototype scientific code and share their experiments as online accessible notebooks. Jupyter can support several popular languages used by data scientists, such as Python, R, and Julia. However, such notebook environments do not have seamless support for running heavy computations on remote infrastructure or finding and accessing collaborative software code inside notebooks. This article investigates the gap between a notebook environment and a VRE and proposes an embedded VRE solution for the Jupyter environment called Notebook‐as‐a‐VRE (NaaVRE). The NaaVRE solution provides functional components via a component marketplace and allows users to create a customized VRE on top of the Jupyter environment. From the VRE, a user can search research assets (data, software, and algorithms), compose workflows, manage the lifecycle of an experiment, and share the results among users in the community. We demonstrate how such a solution can enhance a legacy workflow that uses Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data from country‐wide airborne laser scanning surveys for deriving geospatial data products of ecosystem structure at high resolution over broad spatial extents. This enables users to scale out the processing of multi‐terabyte LiDAR point clouds for ecological applications to more data sources in a distributed cloud environment. Similar applications could be developed for workflows producing other essential biodiversity variables.