eARCO: Efficient Automated Root Cause Analysis with Prompt Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Goel, Drishti, Magazine, Raghav, Ghosh, Supriyo, Nambi, Akshay, Deshpande, Prathamesh, Zhang, Xuchao, Bansal, Chetan, Rajmohan, Saravan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Goel, Drishti
Magazine, Raghav
Ghosh, Supriyo
Nambi, Akshay
Deshpande, Prathamesh
Zhang, Xuchao
Bansal, Chetan
Rajmohan, Saravan
author_facet Goel, Drishti
Magazine, Raghav
Ghosh, Supriyo
Nambi, Akshay
Deshpande, Prathamesh
Zhang, Xuchao
Bansal, Chetan
Rajmohan, Saravan
contents Root cause analysis (RCA) for incidents in large-scale cloud systems is a complex, knowledge-intensive task that often requires significant manual effort from on-call engineers (OCEs). Improving RCA is vital for accelerating the incident resolution process and reducing service downtime and manual efforts. Recent advancements in Large-Language Models (LLMs) have proven to be effective in solving different stages of the incident management lifecycle including RCA. However, existing LLM-based RCA recommendations typically leverage default finetuning or retrieval augmented generation (RAG) methods with static, manually designed prompts, which lead to sub-optimal recommendations. In this work, we leverage 'PromptWizard', a state-of-the-art prompt optimization technique, to automatically identify the best optimized prompt instruction that is combined with semantically similar historical examples for querying underlying LLMs during inference. Moreover, by utilizing more than 180K historical incident data from Microsoft, we developed cost-effective finetuned small language models (SLMs) for RCA recommendation generation and demonstrate the power of prompt optimization on such domain-adapted models. Our extensive experimental results show that prompt optimization can improve the accuracy of RCA recommendations by 21% and 13% on 3K test incidents over RAG-based LLMs and finetuned SLMs, respectively. Lastly, our human evaluation with incident owners have demonstrated the efficacy of prompt optimization on RCA recommendation tasks. These findings underscore the advantages of incorporating prompt optimization into AI for Operations (AIOps) systems, delivering substantial gains without increasing computational overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle eARCO: Efficient Automated Root Cause Analysis with Prompt Optimization
Goel, Drishti
Magazine, Raghav
Ghosh, Supriyo
Nambi, Akshay
Deshpande, Prathamesh
Zhang, Xuchao
Bansal, Chetan
Rajmohan, Saravan
Software Engineering
Root cause analysis (RCA) for incidents in large-scale cloud systems is a complex, knowledge-intensive task that often requires significant manual effort from on-call engineers (OCEs). Improving RCA is vital for accelerating the incident resolution process and reducing service downtime and manual efforts. Recent advancements in Large-Language Models (LLMs) have proven to be effective in solving different stages of the incident management lifecycle including RCA. However, existing LLM-based RCA recommendations typically leverage default finetuning or retrieval augmented generation (RAG) methods with static, manually designed prompts, which lead to sub-optimal recommendations. In this work, we leverage 'PromptWizard', a state-of-the-art prompt optimization technique, to automatically identify the best optimized prompt instruction that is combined with semantically similar historical examples for querying underlying LLMs during inference. Moreover, by utilizing more than 180K historical incident data from Microsoft, we developed cost-effective finetuned small language models (SLMs) for RCA recommendation generation and demonstrate the power of prompt optimization on such domain-adapted models. Our extensive experimental results show that prompt optimization can improve the accuracy of RCA recommendations by 21% and 13% on 3K test incidents over RAG-based LLMs and finetuned SLMs, respectively. Lastly, our human evaluation with incident owners have demonstrated the efficacy of prompt optimization on RCA recommendation tasks. These findings underscore the advantages of incorporating prompt optimization into AI for Operations (AIOps) systems, delivering substantial gains without increasing computational overhead.
title eARCO: Efficient Automated Root Cause Analysis with Prompt Optimization
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11505