Microscope: Pinpoint Performance Issues with Causal Graphs in Micro-service Environments

Driven by the emerging business models (e.g., digital sales) and IT technologies (e.g., DevOps and Cloud computing), the architecture of software is shifting from monolithic to microservice rapidly. Benefit from microservice, software development, and delivery processes are accelerated significantly. However, along with many micro services running in the dynamic cloud environment with complex interactions, identifying and locating the abnormal services are extraordinarily difficult. This paper presents a novel system named “Microscope” to identify and locate the abnormal services with a ranked list of possible root causes in Micro-service environments. Without instrumenting the source code of micro services, Microscope can efficiently construct a service causal graph and infer the causes of performance problems in real time. Experimental evaluations in a micro-service benchmark environment show that Microscope achieves a good diagnosis result, i.e., 88% in precision and 80% in recall, which is higher than several state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, it has a good scalability to adapt to large-scale micro-service systems.