Large Language Models as Realistic Microservice Trace Generators

Workload traces are essential to understand complex computer systems' behavior and manage processing and memory resources. Since real-world traces are hard to obtain, synthetic trace generation is a promising alternative. This paper proposes a first-of-a-kind approach that relies on training a large language model (LLM) to generate synthetic workload traces, specifically microservice call graphs. To capture complex and arbitrary hierarchical structures and implicit constraints in such traces, we show how to fine-tune LLMs to generate recursively, making call graph generation a sequence of easier steps. To further enforce learning constraints in traces and generate uncommon situations, we argue for applying additional instruction tuning steps to align our model with the desired trace features. Our evaluation results show that we can generate diverse realistic traces under various conditions and outperform existing methods in accuracy and validity. We demonstrate that our synthetically generated traces can effectively replace real data to optimize important microservice management tasks. Additionally, our model adapts to downstream trace-related tasks, such as predicting key trace features and infilling missing data.