Microservice root cause analysis (RCA) requires correlating failures across heterogeneous telemetry within complex service dependency graphs. Existing methods often rely on a single telemetry modality; recent LLM-based approaches can suffer from unconstrained exploration and hallucination; and most systems stop at fault ranking without producing actionable incident response. We present GALA+, a graph-augmented LLM agentic framework centered on graph-guided investigation, which uses service dependencies to bound exploration and refine diagnosis through localized multi-modal evidence. For initial hypothesis generation, GALA+ combines complementary telemetry signals with STRIX, a novel trace- and graph-structure-aware scoring module. GALA+ then produces ranked diagnoses, incident summaries, and stratified action recommendations. We further introduce SURE-Score, a human-guided evaluation framework co-developed with industry SRE experts for assessing RCA-specific output quality beyond conventional text similarity metrics. On two microservice benchmarks, GALA+ consistently achieves the strongest overall results, surpassing the best LLM-based baseline by more than 25 percentage points in AC@1, while also receiving the highest ratings from both SURE-Score and independent human SRE evaluation.
Yuanhong Cai, Xiaohui Nie, Kanglin Yin +8cs.SE cs.AI
LLM-based agents are reshaping microservice operations into AgentOps, where benchmarks are key to evaluating failure diagnosis over multimodal observability data. However, existing benchmarks remain largely outcome-oriented: they score only the final answer and fail to assess the systematic reasoning process in failure diagnosis. We address this gap by introducing two large-scale datasets (AIOps2025 and RCA100) under a reasoning-process evaluation paradigm that assesses agentic diagnostic capability along three dimensions: Localization (where the fault occurs), Identification (what type of fault it is), and Reason (whether the reasoning trace is grounded in relevant evidence). Together, the two datasets comprise over 500 expert-labeled failure cases across two representative microservice systems (HipsterShop and the OpenTelemetry Demo Store). They cover diverse fault scenarios across resource, network, runtime, middleware/database, and application-logic categories and provide fine-grained causal evidence to support agent learning and reasoning-process evaluation. Beyond scale and coverage, the datasets have been carefully labelled by domain experts and validated through large-scale competitions, supporting more than 6,000 participating teams. This makes them not only expert-labeled diagnostic datasets, but also competition-validated benchmarks for evaluating agentic failure diagnosis in real-world microservice environments. Datasets are available at https://www.aiops.cn/gitlab/aiops-live-benchmark/agenticopseval.
Modern microservice deployments fail in ways that are easy to detect and hard to explain. When a fault propagates along service dependencies, alerts fire in floods, dashboards multiply, and the scarce resource, an engineer who understands how the services relate, is consumed reconstructing context that the monitoring stack discarded. We argue that the missing ingredient in autonomous operations is not a better anomaly detector or a larger language model, but operational memory: a persistent, structured representation of how a system normally behaves, how its parts depend on one another, and how it has failed before. We present O PS C ORTEX, a working multi-agent prototype that organizes this memory into four tiers and uses it to separate two tasks the field usually conflates: deriving a root cause and explaining it. Root cause is computed deterministically from a learned dependency graph and the temporal ordering of threshold crossings; a large language model (LLM) is then asked only to explain, confirm, and recommend, using evidence the system has already assembled. We motivate the design with two documented production cascading failures, review representative literature on observability, anomaly detection, graph-based localization, and LLM-assisted diagnosis, and show how each architectural choice maps directly to a failure mode those incidents exhibit. The prototype is validated on an instrumented e-commerce benchmark with eight injectable failure scenarios.