Decentralised Data Quality Control in Ground Truth Production for Autonomic Decisions

Abstract

Autonomic decision-making based on rules and metrics is inevitably on the rise in distributed software systems. Often, the metrics are acquired from system observations such as static checks and runtime traces. To avoid bias propagation and hence reduce wrong decisions in increasingly autonomous systems due to poor observation data quality, multiple independent observers can exchange their findings and produce a majority-accepted, complete and outlier-cleaned ground truth in the form of consensus-supported metrics. In this work, we motivate the growing importance of metrics for informed and autonomic decisions in clouds and other distributed systems, present reasons for diverging observations, and describe a federated approach to produce ground truth with data-centric consensus voting for more reliable decision making processes. We validate the system design with experiments in the area of cloud software artefact observations and highlight benefits for reproducible distributed system behaviour.