Look Deep into the Microservice System Anomaly through Very Sparse Logs

Xinrui Jiang, Yicheng Pan, Meng Ma, Ping Wang

Abstract: Intensive monitoring and anomaly diagnosis have become a knotty problem for modern microservice architecture due to the dynamics of service dependency. While most previous studies rely heavily on ample monitoring metrics, we raise a fundamental but always neglected issue - the diagnostic metric integrity problem. This paper solves the problem by proposing MicroCU – a novel approach to diagnose microservice systems using very sparse API logs. We design a structure named dynamic causal curves to portray time-varying service dependencies and a temporal dynamics discovery algorithm based on Granger causal intervals. Our algorithm generates a smoother space of causal curves and designs the concept of causal unimodalization to calibrate the causality infidelities brought by missing metrics. Finally, a path search algorithm on dynamic causality graphs is proposed to pinpoint the root cause. Experiments on commercial system cases show that MicroCU outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches and reflects the superiorities of causal unimodalization to raw metric imputation.