Exploring LLM-based Agents for Root Cause Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Roy, Devjeet, Zhang, Xuchao, Bhave, Rashi, Bansal, Chetan, Las-Casas, Pedro, Fonseca, Rodrigo, Rajmohan, Saravan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Roy, Devjeet
Zhang, Xuchao
Bhave, Rashi
Bansal, Chetan
Las-Casas, Pedro
Fonseca, Rodrigo
Rajmohan, Saravan
author_facet Roy, Devjeet
Zhang, Xuchao
Bhave, Rashi
Bansal, Chetan
Las-Casas, Pedro
Fonseca, Rodrigo
Rajmohan, Saravan
contents The growing complexity of cloud based software systems has resulted in incident management becoming an integral part of the software development lifecycle. Root cause analysis (RCA), a critical part of the incident management process, is a demanding task for on-call engineers, requiring deep domain knowledge and extensive experience with a team's specific services. Automation of RCA can result in significant savings of time, and ease the burden of incident management on on-call engineers. Recently, researchers have utilized Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform RCA, and have demonstrated promising results. However, these approaches are not able to dynamically collect additional diagnostic information such as incident related logs, metrics or databases, severely restricting their ability to diagnose root causes. In this work, we explore the use of LLM based agents for RCA to address this limitation. We present a thorough empirical evaluation of a ReAct agent equipped with retrieval tools, on an out-of-distribution dataset of production incidents collected at Microsoft. Results show that ReAct performs competitively with strong retrieval and reasoning baselines, but with highly increased factual accuracy. We then extend this evaluation by incorporating discussions associated with incident reports as additional inputs for the models, which surprisingly does not yield significant performance improvements. Lastly, we conduct a case study with a team at Microsoft to equip the ReAct agent with tools that give it access to external diagnostic services that are used by the team for manual RCA. Our results show how agents can overcome the limitations of prior work, and practical considerations for implementing such a system in practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04123
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring LLM-based Agents for Root Cause Analysis
Roy, Devjeet
Zhang, Xuchao
Bhave, Rashi
Bansal, Chetan
Las-Casas, Pedro
Fonseca, Rodrigo
Rajmohan, Saravan
Software Engineering
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The growing complexity of cloud based software systems has resulted in incident management becoming an integral part of the software development lifecycle. Root cause analysis (RCA), a critical part of the incident management process, is a demanding task for on-call engineers, requiring deep domain knowledge and extensive experience with a team's specific services. Automation of RCA can result in significant savings of time, and ease the burden of incident management on on-call engineers. Recently, researchers have utilized Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform RCA, and have demonstrated promising results. However, these approaches are not able to dynamically collect additional diagnostic information such as incident related logs, metrics or databases, severely restricting their ability to diagnose root causes. In this work, we explore the use of LLM based agents for RCA to address this limitation. We present a thorough empirical evaluation of a ReAct agent equipped with retrieval tools, on an out-of-distribution dataset of production incidents collected at Microsoft. Results show that ReAct performs competitively with strong retrieval and reasoning baselines, but with highly increased factual accuracy. We then extend this evaluation by incorporating discussions associated with incident reports as additional inputs for the models, which surprisingly does not yield significant performance improvements. Lastly, we conduct a case study with a team at Microsoft to equip the ReAct agent with tools that give it access to external diagnostic services that are used by the team for manual RCA. Our results show how agents can overcome the limitations of prior work, and practical considerations for implementing such a system in practice.
title Exploring LLM-based Agents for Root Cause Analysis
topic Software Engineering
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04123