A Process Discovery for Endpoint-Level Call Relations in Microservice Systems

Microservice architecture is widely adopted in cloud computing for building large-scale distributed systems. However, due to frequent calls between microservices, such systems become increasingly complex and fragile, leading to reduced reliability of the system behavior. Therefore, implementing process discovery and constructing process models for the historical logs of microservice systems becomes crucial to analyzing system behavior. However, existing process discovery methods do not effectively capture the synchronous or asynchronous call relations between microservices at the endpoint level, limiting the ability to analyze the impact of microservice interactions on system performance. This paper proposes a novel process discovery capable of capturing call relations in microservice systems at the endpoint level. First, the call events related to the microservice calls are extracted from the interleaved fragmented raw logs by event serialization to form event sequences. Then, an invocation tree is defined and constructed, and pruning is applied to obtain the subsequence that can be used to derive call relations correctly. Based on the defined event relations, the call relations between endpoints are discovered. Finally, the$\alpha$-based miner is applied to perform the mining and generation of the process model to obtain the defined microservice call net. Experimental results show that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach can accurately and effectively build the microservice system process model.