MicroKGCL: A Knowledge Graph for Root Cause Localization of Feedback Issues in Microservices

The popularity of the microservices architecture has led to an evident trend of integration in system design, enabling systems to integrate numerous services to meet the diverse requirements of users. However, with extensive integration, it is difficult to quickly identify the root cause of the issues. In this paper, we propose MicroKGCL, a knowledge graph for root cause localization of feedback issues in microservices. Through the knowledge graph constructed with historical cases, MicroKGCL explores the potential relationship between user feedback and the root cause of system issues, it analyzes possible issues and ranks candidate root causes. In detail, in order to provide a more accurate representation of the feedback profile, we design a multi-modal embedding block, which utilizes a contrastive learning model and BERT model to extract feedback features from visual and content modalities. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MicroKGCL in terms of both MRR and Hits@n by comparing with the baselines. Moreover, to further verify the MicroKGCL, it has been deployed in the real production environment of Ant Group, achieving a top-3 hit ratio of 75% and a coverage ratio of 81.8%.

1. Introduction

Nowadays, with the prosperity of microservices architecture, a growing number of applications in domains such as mobile and cloud services [1] are using microservices architectures to build large-scale, stable, and user oriented comprehensive systems. Microservices architecture serves as a guiding principle for designing and implementing distributed applications, which makes developers focus more on coordinating the functionalities of different microservices [2]. Consequently, the development of applications is increasingly oriented towards integration, with more and more applications integrating multiple services to meet the increasing demands of users. System integration enables applications to provide enhanced service to users, effectively improving user experience and ensuring user loyalty to the application.