NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series

Abstract

Network operators monitor their infrastructure by collecting telemetry data such as packet counts, byte rates, or flow volumes, yet answering the questions that effective operations demand -- forecasting future load, diagnosing and characterizing anomalies, and searching for and retrieving historical precedents -- requires more than raw measurements. Bridging this gap calls for learned representations: compact per-entity summaries that capture temporal dynamics from each entity's univariate time series. Time-series foundation models are the natural starting point, but they are designed for dense, periodic benchmark datasets -- the \emph{mild} statistical regime. However, network telemetry data inhabits the \emph{wild} regime: operationally relevant events are rare, separated by variable-length stretches of low or no activity (``ebbs''), with intermittent bursts of heavy-tailed extremes (``tides''). We present NetBurst, an event-centric pipeline that collapses ebbs, separates each time series into a stream of burst timings and a stream of burst magnitudes, and learns a single representation serving all three operational tasks. Compared to the strongest competitors among eight baselines -- including Amazon's Chronos-2 and Datadog's Toto -- and across nine production telemetry configurations, NetBurst reduces median forecasting error by $1.3$--$116\times$ on wild-regime data with a $1.0$--$7.5\times$ better match to the true burst distribution, and matches baselines on mild-regime benchmarks. For characterizing anomalies, NetBurst produces balanced, well-spread clusters that are $16\times$ more describable in operator-familiar terms under a novel interpretability score, and cluster-filtered search delivers $7.5\times$ faster end-to-end retrieval.