DeST: An Unsupervised Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Framework for Microservice Incident Management

Xiaohui Nie, Hang Cui, Changhua Pei, Haotian Si, Ke Xiang, Jingjing Li, Yanbiao Li, Gaogang Xie, Dan Pei

Abstract: Effective incident management in large-scale microservice systems demands both accurate anomaly detection (AD) and precise root cause localization (RCL) across heterogeneous data modalities. However, existing approaches often treat these tasks in isolation, resulting in redundant maintenance, delayed response, and the absence of shared diagnostic context. While recent efforts have explored unified frameworks to support both tasks, these approaches often suffer from high falsealarm rates due to cross-modal interference. To address these issues, we propose DeST, an unsupervised decoupled spatiotemporal framework that jointly performs anomaly detection and root cause localization. DeST proposes a multi-stage fusion strategy that decouples temporal and spatial feature learning to mitigate cross-modal interference and prevent cross-modal interference. Furthermore, it incorporates task-specific modal routing to direct learned representations to different tasks, enhancing both detection and localization accuracy. To ensure robustness against transient noise, DeST designs a Differential Multi-Scale Convolutional Network (DMCN) for noise-resistant temporal feature representation. We evaluate DeST on two real-world microservice benchmarks, where it achieves a perfect F1-score of $\mathbf{1. 0 0}$ for anomaly detection and outperforms existing methods in root cause localization accuracy. Ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of key components. Our unified framework reduces false alarms in anomaly detection and streamlines root cause localization, providing a robust and practical solution for microservice incident management.

External IDs:dblp:conf/issre/NieCPSXLLXP25