MetaRCA: A Generalizable Root Cause Analysis Framework for Cloud-Native Systems Powered by Meta Causal Knowledge
The dynamics and complexity of cloud-native systems present significant challenges for Root Cause Analysis (RCA). While causality-based RCA methods have shown significant progress in recent years, their practical adoption is fundamentally limited by three intertwined challenges: poor scalability against system complexity, brittle generalization across different system topologies, and inadequate integration of domain knowledge. These limitations create a vicious cycle, hindering the development of robust and efficient RCA solutions. This paper introduces MetaRCA, a generalizable RCA framework for cloud-native systems. MetaRCA first constructs a Meta Causal Graph (MCG) offline, a reusable knowledge base defined at the metadata level. To build the MCG, we propose an evidence-driven algorithm that systematically fuses knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs), historical fault reports, and observability data. When a fault occurs, MetaRCA performs a lightweight online inference by dynamically instantiating the MCG into a localized graph based on the current context, and then leverages real-time data to weight and prune causal links for precise root cause localization. Evaluated on 252 public and 59 production failures, MetaRCA demonstrates state-of-the-art performance. It surpasses the strongest baseline by 29 percentage points in service-level and 48 percentage points in metric-level accuracy. This performance advantage widens as system complexity increases, with its overhead scaling near-linearly. Crucially, MetaRCA shows robust cross-system generalization, maintaining over 80% accuracy across diverse systems.
Thu 9 JulDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
10:30 - 12:30 | Root Cause AnalysisIndustry Papers / Research Papers / Journal-First Paper at MB 2.430 Chair(s): Julia Lawall Inria | ||
10:30 20mTalk | Rethinking the Evaluation of Microservice RCA with a Fault Propagation-Aware Benchmark Research Papers Aoyang Fang Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Songhan Zhang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Yifan Yang , Haotong Wu The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Junjielong Xu The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Xuyang Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Rui Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Manyi Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Qisheng Lu The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Pinjia He Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Pre-print | ||
10:50 20mTalk | Bridging the Delay: Lag-Aware Spatio-Temporal Causal Inference for Microservice Root Cause Analysis Industry Papers Shenglin Zhang Nankai University, Junhua Kuang Nankai University, Yimeng Zhang Nankai University, Sibo Xia Nankai University, Jintao Feng Nankai University, Jingyu Wang Nanjing University, Wenwei Gu Nankai University, Yongqian Sun Nankai University, Wei Li Alibaba Group, Liping Zhang Alibaba Group, Dan Pei Tsinghua University | ||
11:10 20mTalk | TORAI: Multi-Source Root Cause Analysis for Blind Spots in the Microservice Service Call Graph Research Papers Luan Pham University of New South Wales, Australia, Huong Ha RMIT University, Xiuzhen Zhang RMIT University, Hongyu Zhang Chongqing University Pre-print Media Attached | ||
11:30 20mTalk | CARE: Context Aware Root Cause Identification Using Distributed Traces and Profiling Metrics Journal-First Paper Mahsa Panahandeh Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Naser Ezzati Jivan , Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, James Miller Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada | ||
11:50 20mResearch paper | MetaRCA: A Generalizable Root Cause Analysis Framework for Cloud-Native Systems Powered by Meta Causal Knowledge Research Papers Shuai Liang Sun Yat-sen University; China Unicom Software Research Institute: Beijing, CN, Pengfei Chen Sun Yat-sen University, Bozhe Tian China Unicom Software Research Institute: Beijing, CN, Gou Tan School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, Maohong Xu China Unicom Software Research Institute: Beijing, CN, Youjun Qu China Unicom Software Research Institute: Beijing, CN, Yahui Zhao China Unicom Software Research Institute: Beijing, CN, Yiduo Shang China Unicom Software Research Institute: Beijing, CN, Chongkang Tan Individual Researcher Pre-print | ||