Anomaly Propagation Based Fault Diagnosis for Microservices

Abstract

Microservice architectures separate a large-scale complex application into multiple independent microservices.These microservices with various technology stacks communicate with lightweight protocols to implement agile development and conti-nuous delivery.Since the application using a microservice architecture has a large number of microservices communicating with each other,the faulty microservice should cause other microservices interacting with the faulty one to appear anomalies.How to detect anomalous microservices and locate the root cause microservice has become one of the keys of ensuring the reliability of a microservice based application.To address the above issue,this paper proposes an anomaly propagation-based fault diagnosis approach for microservices by considering the propagation of faults.First,we monitor the interactions between microservices to construct a service dependency graph for characterizing anomaly propagation.Second,we construct a regression model between me-trics and API calls to detect anomalous services.Third,we get the fault propagation subgraph by combining the service dependency graph and the detected abnormal service.Finally,we calculate the anomaly degree of microservices with a PageRank algorithm to locate the most likely root cause of the fault.The experimental results show that our approach can locate faulty microservices with low overhead.

Keywords

• fault diagnosis|microservices|service invocation|metric correlation|anomaly propagation