Physics

Microservices

Resilience (materials science)

Operating system

Distributed computing

Root cause analysis

Geodesy

Software engineering

Engineering

Philosophy

Root (linguistics)

Benchmark (surveying)

Artificial intelligence

Geography

Reliability engineering

Software

Computer science

Linguistics

Real-time computing

Cloud computing

Root cause

Scalability

Anomaly detection

Thermodynamics

Software architecture is undergoing a transition from monolithic architectures to microservices to achieve resilience, agility and scalability in software development. However, with microservices it is difficult to diagnose performance issues due to technology heterogeneity, large number of microservices, and frequent updates to both software features and infrastructure. This paper presents MicroRCA, a system to locate root causes of performance issues in microservices. MicroRCA infers root causes in real time by correlating application performance symptoms with corresponding system resource utilization, with-out any application instrumentation. The root cause localization is based on an attributed graph that model anomaly propagation across services and machines. Our experimental evaluation where common anomalies are injected to a microservice benchmark running in a Kubernetes cluster shows that MicroRCA locates root causes well, with 89% precision and 97% mean average precision, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods.

MicroRCA: Root Cause Localization of Performance Issues in Microservices