# System States Forecasting of Microservices with Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07894/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [NodeFormer: A Scalable Graph Structure Learning Transformer for Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08385/) (2023)
- [Normalized multivariate time series causality analysis and causal graph reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11360/) (2021)
- [About Microservices, Containers and their Underestimated Impact on Network Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04049/) (2017)
- [STGIN: A Spatial Temporal Graph-Informer Network for Long Sequence Traffic Speed Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01799/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) era, accurately forecasting system states is crucial. In microservices systems, this task encounters the challenge of dynamic and complex spatio-temporal relationships among microservice instances, primarily due to dynamic deployments, diverse call paths, and cascading effects among instances. Current time-series forecasting methods, which focus mainly on intrinsic patterns, are insufficient in environments where spatial relationships are critical. Similarly, spatio-temporal graph approaches often neglect the nature of temporal trend, concentrating mostly on message passing between nodes. Moreover, current research in microservices domain frequently underestimates the importance of network metrics and topological structures in capturing the evolving dynamics of systems. This paper introduces STMformer, a model tailored for forecasting system states in microservices environments, capable of handling multi-node and multivariate time series. Our method leverages dynamic network connection data and topological information to assist in modeling the intricate spatio-temporal relationships within the system. Additionally, we integrate the PatchCrossAttention module to compute the impact of cascading effects globally. We have developed a dataset based on a microservices system and conducted comprehensive experiments with STMformer against leading methods. In both short-term and long-term forecasting tasks, our model consistently achieved a 8.6% reduction in MAE(Mean Absolute Error) and a 2.2% reduction in MSE (Mean Squared Error). The source code is available at https://github.com/xuyifeiiie/STMformer.