Predico: A System for What-If Analysis in Complex Data Center Applications

Modern data center applications are complex distributed systems with tens or hundreds of interacting software components. An important management task in data centers is to predict the impact of a certain workload or reconfiguration change on the performance of the application. Such predictions require the design of "What-if" models of the application that take as input hypothetical changes in the application's workload or environment and estimate its impact on performance. The authors present Predico, a workload-based what-if analysis system that uses commonly available monitoring information in large scale systems to enable the administrators to ask a variety of workload-based "What-if" queries about the system.