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In order to meet stringent performance requirements, system administrators must effectively detect undesirable performance behaviours, identify potential root causes and take adequate corrective measures. The problem of uncovering and understanding performance anomalies and their causes (bottlenecks) in different system and application domains is well studied. In order to assess progress, research trends and identify open challenges, we have reviewed major contributions in the area and present our findings in this survey. Our approach provides an overview of anomaly detection and bottleneck identification research as it relates to the performance of computing systems. By identifying fundamental elements of the problem, we are able to categorize existing solutions based on multiple factors such as the detection goals, nature of applications and systems, system observability, and detection methods.

The introduction of a Software-defined infrastructures brings additional challenges to the management of cloud infrastructure. With the impending convergence of telecommunications and cloud infrastructures, datacenters become an essential part of an overall integrated environment. The potential scale of such environments has significant implications as traditional orchestration approaches cannot scale appropriately. However, the combination of infrastructure topology, fine-grained operational data and advanced analytics, has the potential to deliver a scalable approach to facilitate orchestration and resource management. In this paper we introduce Apex Lake, a framework designed to address the question of "how to efficiently define and maintain a physical and logical resource and service landscape enriched by operational data, to support orchestration for optimized service delivery?" We also demonstrate with a use-case illustrating how functionalities provided by Apex Lake can be used dealing with performance anomalies.