MicroRCA: Root Cause Localization of Performance Issues in Microservices

Software architecture is undergoing a transition from monolithic architectures to microservices to achieve resilience, agility and scalability in software development. However, with microservices it is difficult to diagnose performance issues due to technology heterogeneity, large number of microservices, and frequent updates to both software features and infrastructure. This paper presents MicroRCA, a system to locate root causes of performance issues in microservices. MicroRCA infers root causes in real time by correlating application performance symptoms with corresponding system resource utilization, without any application instrumentation. The root cause localization is based on an attributed graph that model anomaly propagation across services and machines. Our experimental evaluation where common anomalies are injected to a microservice benchmark running in a Kubernetes cluster shows that MicroRCA locates root causes well, with 89% precision and 97% mean average precision, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods.