TY - GEN
T1 - Root Cause Analysis in Microservice Using Neural Granger Causal Discovery
AU - Lin, Cheng Ming
AU - Chang, Ching
AU - Wang, Wei Yao
AU - Wang, Kuang Da
AU - Peng, Wen Chih
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2024, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
PY - 2024/3/25
Y1 - 2024/3/25
N2 - In recent years, microservices have gained widespread adoption in IT operations due to their scalability, maintenance, and flexibility. However, it becomes challenging for site reliability engineers (SREs) to pinpoint the root cause due to the complex relationships in microservices when facing system malfunctions. Previous research employed structured learning methods (e.g., PC-algorithm) to establish causal relationships and derive root causes from causal graphs. Nevertheless, they ignored the temporal order of time series data and failed to leverage the rich information inherent in the temporal relationships. For instance, in cases where there is a sudden spike in CPU utilization, it can lead to an increase in latency for other microservices. However, in this scenario, the anomaly in CPU utilization occurs before the latency increase, rather than simultaneously. As a result, the PC-algorithm fails to capture such characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose RUN, a novel approach for root cause analysis using neural Granger causal discovery with contrastive learning. RUN enhances the backbone encoder by integrating contextual information from time series, and leverages a time series forecasting model to conduct neural Granger causal discovery. In addition, RUN incorporates Pagerank with a personalization vector to efficiently recommend the top-k root causes. Extensive experiments conducted on the synthetic and real-world microservice-based datasets demonstrate that RUN noticeably outperforms the state-of-the-art root cause analysis methods. Moreover, we provide an analysis scenario for the sock-shop case to showcase the practicality and efficacy of RUN in microservice-based applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zmlin1998/RUN.
AB - In recent years, microservices have gained widespread adoption in IT operations due to their scalability, maintenance, and flexibility. However, it becomes challenging for site reliability engineers (SREs) to pinpoint the root cause due to the complex relationships in microservices when facing system malfunctions. Previous research employed structured learning methods (e.g., PC-algorithm) to establish causal relationships and derive root causes from causal graphs. Nevertheless, they ignored the temporal order of time series data and failed to leverage the rich information inherent in the temporal relationships. For instance, in cases where there is a sudden spike in CPU utilization, it can lead to an increase in latency for other microservices. However, in this scenario, the anomaly in CPU utilization occurs before the latency increase, rather than simultaneously. As a result, the PC-algorithm fails to capture such characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose RUN, a novel approach for root cause analysis using neural Granger causal discovery with contrastive learning. RUN enhances the backbone encoder by integrating contextual information from time series, and leverages a time series forecasting model to conduct neural Granger causal discovery. In addition, RUN incorporates Pagerank with a personalization vector to efficiently recommend the top-k root causes. Extensive experiments conducted on the synthetic and real-world microservice-based datasets demonstrate that RUN noticeably outperforms the state-of-the-art root cause analysis methods. Moreover, we provide an analysis scenario for the sock-shop case to showcase the practicality and efficacy of RUN in microservice-based applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zmlin1998/RUN.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85189353535&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1609/aaai.v38i1.27772
DO - 10.1609/aaai.v38i1.27772
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85189353535
T3 - Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
SP - 206
EP - 213
BT - Technical Tracks 14
A2 - Wooldridge, Michael
A2 - Dy, Jennifer
A2 - Natarajan, Sriraam
PB - Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
T2 - 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2024
Y2 - 20 February 2024 through 27 February 2024
ER -