ClouDens: Operational Context-Aware Anomaly Detection for Large-scale Cloud System Monitoring

With the rapid growth of cloud computing infrastructures in scale and complexity, network monitoring for Large-scale Cloud Systems (LCSs) has become increasingly challenging, requiring automated and reliable anomaly detection to maintain service availability. Modern LCSs continuously generate telemetry logs from distributed cloud services, producing high-dimensional multivariate time series that capture system operations. Detecting anomalies in this context is difficult due to extreme dimensionality, complex dependencies among distributed components, and severe sparsity from intermittently active services. Taking these challenges into account, we first conduct an empirical study on telemetry logs from the IBM Cloud Console platform, and then propose ClouDens, an anomaly detection framework tailored to LCS monitoring that leverages operational-context attributes encoded in the telemetry log schema to improve detection accuracy and early identification of anomalies. ClouDens partitions high-dimensional telemetry logs into domain-guided subsets, constructs a context-aware graph modeling operational service dependencies, and employs Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for forecasting-based anomaly detection. We evaluate ClouDens on the recently released IBM Cloud Telemetry Dataset and provide practical insights into designing reliable anomaly detection solutions for LCS monitoring. Results show ClouDens achieves higher NAB scores in count-based telemetry features, indicating more accurate, earlier anomaly detection with broader coverage than a GRU-based model. Our study further reveals that telemetry feature subsets, operational-context modeling, scoring strategies, and sparsity imputation all substantially influence detection performance, offering practical guidance for designing and fairly benchmarking anomaly detection approaches for LCS monitoring.