Root Cause Analysis for Microservice System based on Causal Inference: How Far Are We?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Pham, Luan, Ha, Huong, Zhang, Hongyu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Pham, Luan
Ha, Huong
Zhang, Hongyu
author_facet Pham, Luan
Ha, Huong
Zhang, Hongyu
contents Microservice architecture has become a popular architecture adopted by many cloud applications. However, identifying the root cause of a failure in microservice systems is still a challenging and time-consuming task. In recent years, researchers have introduced various causal inference-based root cause analysis methods to assist engineers in identifying the root causes. To gain a better understanding of the current status of causal inference-based root cause analysis techniques for microservice systems, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nine causal discovery methods and twenty-one root cause analysis methods. Our evaluation aims to understand both the effectiveness and efficiency of causal inference-based root cause analysis methods, as well as other factors that affect their performance. Our experimental results and analyses indicate that no method stands out in all situations; each method tends to either fall short in effectiveness, efficiency, or shows sensitivity to specific parameters. Notably, the performance of root cause analysis methods on synthetic datasets may not accurately reflect their performance in real systems. Indeed, there is still a large room for further improvement. Furthermore, we also suggest possible future work based on our findings.
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publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle Root Cause Analysis for Microservice System based on Causal Inference: How Far Are We?
Pham, Luan
Ha, Huong
Zhang, Hongyu
Software Engineering
Microservice architecture has become a popular architecture adopted by many cloud applications. However, identifying the root cause of a failure in microservice systems is still a challenging and time-consuming task. In recent years, researchers have introduced various causal inference-based root cause analysis methods to assist engineers in identifying the root causes. To gain a better understanding of the current status of causal inference-based root cause analysis techniques for microservice systems, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nine causal discovery methods and twenty-one root cause analysis methods. Our evaluation aims to understand both the effectiveness and efficiency of causal inference-based root cause analysis methods, as well as other factors that affect their performance. Our experimental results and analyses indicate that no method stands out in all situations; each method tends to either fall short in effectiveness, efficiency, or shows sensitivity to specific parameters. Notably, the performance of root cause analysis methods on synthetic datasets may not accurately reflect their performance in real systems. Indeed, there is still a large room for further improvement. Furthermore, we also suggest possible future work based on our findings.
title Root Cause Analysis for Microservice System based on Causal Inference: How Far Are We?
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13729