Structure-Aware Unified Modeling for Root Cause Localization in Microservice Systems Using Multi-Source Observability Data

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Authors: Zixiao Huang, Sijia Li, Chengda Xu, Bolin Chen, Yihan Xue, Jixiao Yang
Cited by: 1

Abstract

By decoupling services and enabling elastic deployment, microservice architecture improves system scalability and evolutionary capability. At the same time, it substantially increases operational complexity. Failures often exhibit cross service propagation and a mismatch between observed symptoms and underlying root causes. To address the heterogeneity and fragmentation of multi source observability data such as logs, metrics, and distributed traces, this study proposes a unified modeling and intelligent root cause localization method for microservice systems. The approach treats each service as a basic modeling unit and maps heterogeneous observations into a shared representation space. Service dependency structure is explicitly incorporated to characterize system state at a global level. Through structure aware modeling on the dependency graph, anomaly information is propagated and constrained along real invocation relations. This design enables more accurate separation of local disturbances from structural anomalies. In addition, a consistency based measure derived from state deviation is constructed to score service anomalies. Dependency relations are then used for attribution and ranking, which unifies root cause localization and impact analysis within a single framework. Comparative results show that the proposed method achieves more stable and consistent advantages across multiple evaluation metrics. It captures anomaly propagation patterns in microservice systems more effectively and provides a unified and structure aware solution for intelligent diagnosis of complex distributed systems.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Software System Performance and Reliability Software-Defined Networks and 5G Cloud Computing and Resource Management

Publication details

Journal / source
Preprints.org
Publisher
MDPI AG
Publication date
2 March 2026
Document type
Preprint