DynaCausal: Dynamic Causality-Aware Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Microservices

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22613v1
• Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2025 10:13:18 GMT
• Title: DynaCausal: Dynamic Causality-Aware Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Microservices
• Authors: Songhan Zhang, Aoyang Fang, Yifan Yang, Ruiyi Cheng, Xiaoying Tang, Pinjia He,
• Abstract summary: DynaCausal is a dynamic causality-aware framework for cause analysis in distributed microservice systems.<n>We show how DynaCausal consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods, attaining an average AC@1 of 0.63 with absolute gains from 0.25 to 0.46.
• Score: 17.058900957896864
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Cloud-native microservices enable rapid iteration and scalable deployment but also create complex, fast-evolving dependencies that challenge reliable diagnosis. Existing root cause analysis (RCA) approaches, even with multi-modal fusion of logs, traces, and metrics, remain limited in capturing dynamic behaviors and shifting service relationships. Three critical challenges persist: (i) inadequate modeling of cascading fault propagation, (ii) vulnerability to noise interference and concept drift in normal service behavior, and (iii) over-reliance on service deviation intensity that obscures true root causes. To address these challenges, we propose DynaCausal, a dynamic causality-aware framework for RCA in distributed microservice systems. DynaCausal unifies multi-modal dynamic signals to capture time-varying spatio-temporal dependencies through interaction-aware representation learning. It further introduces a dynamic contrastive mechanism to disentangle true fault indicators from contextual noise and adopts a causal-prioritized pairwise ranking objective to explicitly optimize causal attribution. Comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that DynaCausal consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods, attaining an average AC@1 of 0.63 with absolute gains from 0.25 to 0.46, and delivering both accurate and interpretable diagnoses in highly dynamic microservice environments.

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