Getting started

See the Installation page after reviewing the below.

Managed Service

You can sign up to Anomify, a cutting edge Skyline service, built and managed by the team behind Skyline. Anomify is offering a free service for beta users. Or you can elect to clone the Skyline repository from Github and run Skyline on premise or in your own cloud infrastructure and follow the steps below.

A collection of applications

Skyline is made up of a collection of applications that interact with each other but all run independently, each fulfilling a specific role in the analysis pipeline. Lets go through them briefly. Horizon, Analyzer, Mirage, Panorama, Boundary, Crucible, Ionosphere, Luminosity, Vista, Flux and the webapp (and snab). That is a lot… full featured. Only the core real times applications will be introduced here.

  • Graphite - although Graphite is not part of Skyline it is Skyline’s long term time series database.
  • Redis - transient database for real time data and sharing data between Skyline applications.
  • Horizon - receives metrics from Graphite and feeds them into Redis. And also prunes old time series data from Redis.
  • Analyzer - every minute, gets 24 hours of metric data from Redis and analyses them all with 9 three-sigma based algorithms and pushes potential anomalies to Mirage or Ionosphere.
  • Mirage analyses potential anomalies with the same 9 three-sigma based algorithms but against a longer period of data than 24 hours, normally 7 days. It also analyses the metric with any defined custom algorithms such as matrixprofile. If the instance is still considered anomalous, Mirage forwards it to Ionosphere (if the metric has been trained on) or alerts on the metric.
  • Ionosphere extracts features and potentially anomalous shapelets from the data and runs similarity searches across all trained data, if still anomalous, it sends an alert.
  • Panorama receives detected anomalies from Analyzer, Mirage, Boundary and Ionosphere and records the details in the database.
  • Boundary analyses defined metrics against specified thresholds and configured dynamic thresholds and alerts if breached.
  • Luminosity cross correlates anomalies with the entire or defined metric population and can classify anomaly types.

Realistic expectations

Anomaly detection is not easy. Skyline is not easy to set up, it has a number of moving parts that need to be orchestrated. Further to this, for Skyline to be configured, trained and start learning takes time. But rest assured once set up, it just runs and runs and runs, requiring minimal maintenance, if any.

Anomaly detection is a journey not an app

Anomaly detection is partly about automated anomaly detection and partly about knowing your metrics and time series patterns. Not all time series are created equally.

It helps to think of anomaly detection as an ongoing journey. Although ideally it would be great to be able to computationally detect anomalies with a high degree of certainty, there is no getting away from the fact that the more you learn, “help” and tune your anomaly detection, the better it will become.

The fact that Skyline does computationally detect anomalies with a high degree of certainty, can be a problem in itself. But it is not Skyline’s fault that:

  • a lot of your metrics are anomalous
  • that feeding all your metrics to Skyline and setting alerting on all your metric namespaces is too noisy to be generally considered useful

Enabling metrics incrementally

Skyline was originally pitched to automatically monitor #allthethings, all your metrics, it can but…

Skyline should have been pitched to monitor your KEY metrics.

To begin with decide what your 100 most important metrics are and only configure settings.ALERTS and settings.SMTP_OPTS and slack on those to begin with and get to know what Skyline does with those. Add more key metric groups as you get the hang of it.

You cannot rush time series.

Enabling Skyline modules incrementally

Skyline’s modules do different things differently and understanding the process and pipeline helps to tune each Skyline module appropriately for your data.

Each analysis based module, Analyzer, Mirage, Boundary, Ionosphere, Luminosity (and Crucible), have their own specific configurations. These configurations are not extremely complex, but they are not obvious or trivial either when you are starting out. Bringing Skyline modules online incrementally over time, helps you to understand the processes and their different configuration settings easier. Easier than trying to get the whole stack up and running straight off.

Start with Horizon, Analyzer, Mirage, Ionosphere and Webapp, Luminosity and Panorama

It is advisable to only start the Horizon, Analyzer, Mirage, Ionosphere, Webapp, Luminosity and Panorama daemons initially and take time to understand what Skyline is doing. Take some time to tune Analyzer’s settings.ALERTS and learn the patterns in your IMPORTANT metrics:

  • which metrics trigger anomalies?
  • when the metrics trigger anomalies?
  • why/what known events are triggering anomalies?
  • are there seasonality/periodicity in anomalies some metrics?
  • what metrics are critical and what metrics are just “normal”/expected noise

Panorama will help you view what things are triggering as anomalous.

Once you have got an idea of what you want to anomaly detect on and more importantly, on what and when you want to alert, you can start to define the settings for other Skyline modules such as Mirage, Boundary and Ionosphere and bring them online too. However do consider enabling Ionosphere from the outset as well.

Add Mirage parameters to settings.ALERTS

Once you have an overview of metrics that have seasonality that are greater than the settings.FULL_DURATION, you can add their Mirage parameters to the settings.ALERTS tuples to be analysed by Mirage.

Add Boundary settings

You will know what your key metrics are and you can define their acceptable boundaries and alerting channels in the settings.BOUNDARY_METRICS tuples and start the Boundary daemon.

Train Ionosphere

Via the alert emails or in the Skyline Ionosphere UI, train Ionosphere on what is NOT anomalous.

Ignore Crucible

Still EXPERIMENTAL - for the time being.

By default Crucible is enabled in the settings.py however, for other Skyline modules to send Crucible data, Crucible has to be enabled via the appropriate settings.py variable for each module, Analyzer and Mirage, etc.

Crucible has 2 roles:

  1. Store resources (time series json and graph pngs) for triggered anomalies - note this can consume a lot of disk space if enabled.
  2. Run ad hoc analysis on any time series and create matplotlib plots for the run algorithms.

It is not advisable to enable Crucible on any of the other modules unless you really want to “see” anomalies in great depth. Crucible allows the user to test any time series of any metric directly through the webapp UI.