Failure prediction is crucial for ensuring the stability of cloud computing systems and has garnered extensive attention from both academia and industry. Generally, data used for prediction includes two modalities: 1) Text data, such as logs; and, 2) Numerical data, such as error counts and monitoring metrics. However, most existing failure prediction algorithms for cloud computing only focus on a single modality. The lack of high-quality multimodal datasets from real-world production environments constrains academic research on multimodal failure prediction. To fill this gap, this paper releases a large multimodal dataset of operation data from the Alibaba cloud computing platform, namely, Logs and Metrics Integration Dataset (LMID). It consists of 100 million pieces of logs (textual data) and 37 dimensions of monitoring metrics (numerical data) from 220,000 physical machines. To our knowledge, it is the first multimodal dataset for cloud computing system failure prediction, and is expected to greatly benefit the community. This paper provides a detailed introduction to the construction of LMID, its contents, and the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms on it. It also conducts extensive experiments to reveal a new insight that cross-modality connections are effective for failure prediction. LMID is now available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AliyunECSAlgos/LMID.

Log-based failure prediction helps identify and mitigate system failures ahead of time, increasing the reliability of cloud elastic computing systems.However, most existing log-based failure prediction approaches only focus on semantic information, and do not make full use of the information contained in the timestamps of log messages.This paper proposes time-aware attention-based transformer (TAAT), a failure prediction approach that extracts semantic and temporal information simultaneously from log messages and their timestamps.TAAT first tokenizes raw log messages into specific exceptions, and then performs: 1) exception sequence embedding that reorganizes the exceptions of each node as an ordered sequence and converts them to vectors; 2) time relation estimation that computes time relation matrices from the timestamps; and, 3) time-aware attention that computes semantic correlation matrices from the exception sequences and then combines them with time relation matrices.Experiments on Alibaba Cloud demonstrated that TAAT achieves an approximately 10% performance improvement compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.TAAT is now used in the daily operation of Alibaba Cloud.Moreover, this paper also releases the real-world cloud computing failure prediction dataset used in our study, which consists of about 2.7 billion syslogs from about 300,000 node controllers during a 4-month period.To our * Both authors contributed equally to this research.

Traditional server failure prediction methods predominantly rely on single-modality data such as system logs or system status curves. This reliance may lead to an incomplete understanding of system health and impending issues, proving inadequate for the complex and dynamic landscape of contemporary cloud computing environments. The potential of multimodal data to provide comprehensive insights is widely acknowledged, yet the lack of a holistic dataset and the challenges inherent in integrating features from both structured and unstructured data have impeded the exploration of multimodal-based server failure prediction. Addressing these challenges, this paper presents an industrial-scale, comprehensive dataset for server failure prediction, comprising nearly 80 types of structured and unstructured data sourced from real-world industrial cloud systems 1. Building on this resource, we introduce MISP, a model that leverages multimodal fusion techniques for server failure prediction. MISP transforms multimodal data into multi-dimensional sequences, extracts and encodes features both within and across the modalities, and ultimately computes the failure probability from the synthesized features. Experiments demonstrate that MISP significantly outperforms existing methods, enhancing prediction accuracy by approximately 25% over previous state-of-the-art approaches.