ModelCoder: A Fault Model based Automatic Root Cause Localization Framework for Microservice Systems

Abstract

Microservice system is an architectural style to develop a single application as a suite of small services running in its process and communicating with lightweight message mechanisms. Although microservice architecture enables rapid, frequent and reliable delivery of large, complex applications, it is increasingly challenging for operational staffs to locate the root cause of a microservice fault, which usually occurs on a service node and propagates to affect the entire system. To this end, in this paper, we first introduce the concept of deployment graph and service dependency graph to depict the deployment status and calling relationship between service nodes. Then we formulate the root cause localization problem in microservice systems based on the constructed graphs, in which fault model is defined to capture the characteristics of a fault’s root cause. A fault model based automatic root cause localization framework called ModelCoder is later developed to figure out the root cause of unknown faults by comparing with the predefined fault models. We evaluate ModelCoder on a real-world microservice system monitoring data set spanning 15 days. Through extensive experiments, it is revealed that ModelCoder can localize the fault root cause nodes within 80 seconds on average and improve the root cause localization accuracy (to 93%) by 12% compared with the state-of-the-art root cause localization algorithm.