A Unified Framework for Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis in Microservice Systems
Oliver G. J. Meyer, Eric Johnson, Jacob Brown · Jisuanji shenghuojia. · 2025
Modern software applications increasingly rely on microservice architectures for scalability, flexibility, and rapid deployment. However, this architectural paradigm introduces new complexities in monitoring system behavior, identifying anomalies, and determining their root causes across distributed services. Existing solutions often address anomaly detection and root cause analysis (RCA) in isolation, leading to fragmented insights and delayed resolution. This paper proposes a unified framework that integrates real-time anomaly detection with automated RCA using machine learning and graph-based dependency modeling. The framework continuously monitors telemetry data—including metrics, logs, and traces—and applies an ensemble of statistical and deep learning models for multivariate anomaly detection. Detected anomalies are then contextualized through a service dependency graph and analyzed using causal inference techniques to identify the most probable root causes. We evaluate the framework on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world microservice deployments. Experimental results show that it achieves high precision and recall in anomaly detection while significantly reducing RCA latency compared to baseline methods. By combining anomaly detection and RCA in a cohesive pipeline, the proposed framework enhances system observability and reduces mean time to recovery (MTTR), thus improving operational resilience in complex microservice environments.