MetaRCA: A Generalizable Root Cause Analysis Framework for Cloud-Native Systems Powered by Meta Causal Knowledge

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02032v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:16:22 GMT
• Title: MetaRCA: A Generalizable Root Cause Analysis Framework for Cloud-Native Systems Powered by Meta Causal Knowledge
• Authors: Shuai Liang, Pengfei Chen, Bozhe Tian, Gou Tan, Maohong Xu, Youjun Qu, Yahui Zhao, Yiduo Shang, Chongkang Tan,
• Abstract summary: The dynamics and complexity of cloud-native systems present significant challenges for Root Cause Analysis (RCA)<n>This paper introduces MetaRCA, a generalizable RCA framework for cloud-native systems.
• Score: 3.8594782754324535
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The dynamics and complexity of cloud-native systems present significant challenges for Root Cause Analysis (RCA). While causality-based RCA methods have shown significant progress in recent years, their practical adoption is fundamentally limited by three intertwined challenges: poor scalability against system complexity, brittle generalization across different system topologies, and inadequate integration of domain knowledge. These limitations create a vicious cycle, hindering the development of robust and efficient RCA solutions. This paper introduces MetaRCA, a generalizable RCA framework for cloud-native systems. MetaRCA first constructs a Meta Causal Graph (MCG) offline, a reusable knowledge base defined at the metadata level. To build the MCG, we propose an evidence-driven algorithm that systematically fuses knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs), historical fault reports, and observability data. When a fault occurs, MetaRCA performs a lightweight online inference by dynamically instantiating the MCG into a localized graph based on the current context, and then leverages real-time data to weight and prune causal links for precise root cause localization. Evaluated on 252 public and 59 production failures, MetaRCA demonstrates state-of-the-art performance. It surpasses the strongest baseline by 29 percentage points in service-level and 48 percentage points in metric-level accuracy. This performance advantage widens as system complexity increases, with its overhead scaling near-linearly. Crucially, MetaRCA shows robust cross-system generalization, maintaining over 80% accuracy across diverse systems.

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