TraceModel: An Automatic Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Localization Framework for Microservice Systems

Microservice system is a web application architecture that divides a single application into a suite of service nodes running as separate processes and communicating with lightweight message mechanisms. Although microservice can improve the abstraction, modularity and extensibility of web applications, it makes the anomaly detection and fault root cause localization more challenging for operational staff. To this end, in this paper, we first introduce the concept of service dependency graph (SDG) to depict the complex calling relationship between nodes and then develop an anomaly detection and root cause localization framework called TraceModel which consists of TraceVAE and ModelCoder. TraceVAE divides user requests into different request classes according to well-constructed trace and analysis them separately with variational autoencoder(VAE) to figures out abnormal requests. Based on the anomaly detection results of TraceVAE, ModelCoder localizes the root cause of unknown faults by comparing their fault features with the predefined fault models. By evaluating TraceModel on a real-world microservice system monitoring data set spanning 15 days, it is revealed that TraceModel can detect the anomaly and localize the fault root cause nodes within 110 seconds on average. Furthermore, it improves the root cause localization accuracy (to 97%) by 17.5% compared with the state-of-the-art root cause localization algorithm.