PowerTracer: Tracing requests in multi-tier services to diagnose energy inefficiency

As energy has become one of the key operating costs in running a data center and power waste commonly exists, it is essential to reduce energy inefficiency inside data centers. In this paper, we develop an innovative framework called PowerTracer, for diagnosing energy-inefficiency. Inside the framework, we first present a resource tracing method based on request tracing in multi-tier services of black boxes. Then, we propose a generalized methodology of applying a request tracing approach for energy-inefficiency diagnosis in multitier service systems. With insights into service performance and resource consumption of individual requests, we develop a bottleneck diagnosis tool that pinpoints the root causes of energy inefficiency. We implement the prototype and conduct experiments to validate its effectiveness.