FSE 2026
Sun 5 - Thu 9 July 2026 Montreal, Canada
Thu 9 Jul 2026 11:10 - 11:30 at MB 2.430 - Root Cause Analysis Chair(s): Julia Lawall

Typical multi-source root cause analysis (RCA) methods for microservice systems assume all services have traces to construct a service call graph. However, this assumption is not practical as microservice systems evolve rapidly and may contain blackbox services without traces, such as compiled software or unsupported services. We refer to these services as \textit{blind spots}. In the presence of blind spots, the performance of existing multi-source RCA methods may be affected, as they only diagnose \textit{visible} services on the call graph. To overcome this limitation, we propose TORAI, a novel unsupervised approach that effectively pinpoints fine-grained root causes without relying on the service call graph. Instead, TORAI first measures anomaly severity using available multi-source telemetry data. It then performs clustering to group services based on their severity symptoms and conducts causal analysis to rank services within each severity cluster. Finally, TORAI aggregates the cluster rankings and uses hypothesis testing to identify fine-grained root causes. TORAI provides an unsupervised approach that leverages available multi-source telemetry data for RCA without requiring a constructed service call graph or further intrusive actions, thus addressing the limitations of existing methods. Our experiments on three benchmark systems demonstrate that TORAI outperforms state-of-the-art baselines remarkably in the presence of blind spots. Performance on real-world failures further shows that TORAI can accurately pinpoint the root causes in top-3 recommendations.

Thu 9 Jul

Displayed 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
20m
Talk
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
20m
Talk
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
20m
Talk
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
20m
Talk
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
20m
Research 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