DynaCausal: Dynamic Causality-Aware Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Microservices

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Songhan, Fang, Aoyang, Yang, Yifan, Cheng, Ruiyi, Tang, Xiaoying, He, Pinjia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Songhan
Fang, Aoyang
Yang, Yifan
Cheng, Ruiyi
Tang, Xiaoying
He, Pinjia
author_facet Zhang, Songhan
Fang, Aoyang
Yang, Yifan
Cheng, Ruiyi
Tang, Xiaoying
He, Pinjia
contents Cloud-native microservices enable rapid iteration and scalable deployment but also create complex, fast-evolving dependencies that challenge reliable diagnosis. Existing root cause analysis (RCA) approaches, even with multi-modal fusion of logs, traces, and metrics, remain limited in capturing dynamic behaviors and shifting service relationships. Three critical challenges persist: (i) inadequate modeling of cascading fault propagation, (ii) vulnerability to noise interference and concept drift in normal service behavior, and (iii) over-reliance on service deviation intensity that obscures true root causes. To address these challenges, we propose DynaCausal, a dynamic causality-aware framework for RCA in distributed microservice systems. DynaCausal unifies multi-modal dynamic signals to capture time-varying spatio-temporal dependencies through interaction-aware representation learning. It further introduces a dynamic contrastive mechanism to disentangle true fault indicators from contextual noise and adopts a causal-prioritized pairwise ranking objective to explicitly optimize causal attribution. Comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that DynaCausal consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods, attaining an average AC@1 of 0.63 with absolute gains from 0.25 to 0.46, and delivering both accurate and interpretable diagnoses in highly dynamic microservice environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22613
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DynaCausal: Dynamic Causality-Aware Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Microservices
Zhang, Songhan
Fang, Aoyang
Yang, Yifan
Cheng, Ruiyi
Tang, Xiaoying
He, Pinjia
Software Engineering
Cloud-native microservices enable rapid iteration and scalable deployment but also create complex, fast-evolving dependencies that challenge reliable diagnosis. Existing root cause analysis (RCA) approaches, even with multi-modal fusion of logs, traces, and metrics, remain limited in capturing dynamic behaviors and shifting service relationships. Three critical challenges persist: (i) inadequate modeling of cascading fault propagation, (ii) vulnerability to noise interference and concept drift in normal service behavior, and (iii) over-reliance on service deviation intensity that obscures true root causes. To address these challenges, we propose DynaCausal, a dynamic causality-aware framework for RCA in distributed microservice systems. DynaCausal unifies multi-modal dynamic signals to capture time-varying spatio-temporal dependencies through interaction-aware representation learning. It further introduces a dynamic contrastive mechanism to disentangle true fault indicators from contextual noise and adopts a causal-prioritized pairwise ranking objective to explicitly optimize causal attribution. Comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that DynaCausal consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods, attaining an average AC@1 of 0.63 with absolute gains from 0.25 to 0.46, and delivering both accurate and interpretable diagnoses in highly dynamic microservice environments.
title DynaCausal: Dynamic Causality-Aware Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Microservices
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22613