Alarm-Based Root Cause Analysis Based on Weighted Fault Propagation Topology for Distributed Information Network

doi:10.12142/ZTECOM.202203010

ZTE Communications ›› 2022, Vol. 20 ›› Issue (3): 77-84.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202203010

• Research Paper • Previous Articles Next Articles

Alarm-Based Root Cause Analysis Based on Weighted Fault Propagation Topology for Distributed Information Network

LYU Xiaomeng¹(), CHEN Hao¹, WU Zhenyu¹, HAN Junhua², GUO Huifeng²

^1.Engineering Research Center for Information Networks, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
^2.ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen 518057, China

Received:2021-10-31 Online:2022-09-13 Published:2022-09-14
About author:LYU Xiaomeng (lvxiaomeng@bupt.edu.cn) is studying for her master’s degree at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China and received her bachelor’s degree in information and communication engineering from BUPT in 2019. Her main research interests include fault prediction and fault diagnosis. She has published one paper in disks fault prediction and two patents in the AIOps.|CHEN Hao is studying for his master’s degree at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China and received his bachelor’s degree in 2020 at the Faculty of the Information and Communication Engineering, BUPT. His main research interests are fault recognition and prediction.|WU Zhenyu received his BS and PhD degrees from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China in 2008 and 2013. He is currently an associate professor of School of Information and Communication Engineering at BUPT. His research interests include AIOps, intelligent fault diagnostics, machine learning and prognostics and health management (PHM) technology.|HAN Junhua received his master’s degree from Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (now University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) in 2005. He is currently an engineer of ZTE Corporation. His research interests include intelligent operation and maintenance, intelligent fault diagnosis, knowledge graph and graph neural network.|GUO Huifeng received her master’s degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China. She is currently an engineer of ZTE Corporation. Her research interests include intelligent network and fault management.
Supported by:
ZTE Industry-University-Institute Cooperation Funds(HC-CN-20201120009)

Abstract

Abstract:

A distributed information network with complex network structure always has a challenge of locating fault root causes. In this paper, we propose a novel root cause analysis (RCA) method by random walk on the weighted fault propagation graph. Different from other RCA methods, it mines effective features information related to root causes from offline alarms. Combined with the information, online alarms and graph relationship of network structure are used to construct a weighted graph. Thus, this approach does not require operational experience and can be widely applied in different distributed networks. The proposed method can be used in multiple fault location cases. The experiment results show the proposed approach achieves much better performance with 6% higher precision at least for root fault location, compared with three baseline methods. Besides, we explain how the optimal parameter’s value in the random walk algorithm influences RCA results.

Key words: distributed information network, alarm, graph, root cause analysis, random walk

LYU Xiaomeng, CHEN Hao, WU Zhenyu, HAN Junhua, GUO Huifeng. Alarm-Based Root Cause Analysis Based on Weighted Fault Propagation Topology for Distributed Information Network[J]. ZTE Communications, 2022, 20(3): 77-84.

Figures/Tables 9

Figure 1 Graph of an e-commerce platform

Figure 2 Framework of the proposed WFPT-RCA

Figure 3 Procedure of ASG generation

Table 1 Examples of alarms generated during a fault in Dataset A

Timestamp	System	Host	Alarm content	Is_root
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_5	Host_14	I/O wait load exceeds 10% for 15 minutes	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_4	Host _9	The log generates ERROR information	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_9	Host _92	On CPU Steal Time lasts 5 minutes over 10%	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_9	Host _75	Free swap space is less than 50%	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_5	Host _60	The communication on port 80 is abnormal	1
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_5	Host _76	The upper I/O wait load is greater than 50%	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_4	Host _23	Ping packet loss rate is 100%, and the server breaks down	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_9	Host _75	The Slot00 status of the hard disk is failed	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_9	Host _60	Number of FullGC: 32 (greater than threshold: 10)	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_5	Host _97	Average heap memory usage: 94.61% (greater than threshold: 90%)	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_5	Host _32	Average FullGC time: 2 118 ms (greater than threshold: 1 000 ms)	0
2019/6/14 1:14	SYS_4	Host _3	Nic traffic unknown	0

Table 2 Examples of alarms generated during a fault in Dataset B

Timestamp	NE	Duration	System Type	Code	Severity	Alarm Type	Root
2020/2/27 10:01	4 167	1 000	4 198	964	1	0	0
2020/2/27 10:01	4 715	12 000	4 590	18 956	2	3	0
2020/2/27 10:01	4 167	15 000	4 197	43	4	0	1
2020/2/27 10:01	4 167	11 000	4 590	18 956	4	3	0
2020/2/27 10:01	4 166	5 000	4 590	18 956	3	3	0
2020/2/27 10:01	4 595	10 000	4 198	964	1	0	0
2020/2/27 10:01	5 496	6 000	4 590	18 956	3	1	0
2020/2/27 10:01	5 497	5 000	4 197	43	4	4	0

Table 3 Features used for feature importance analysis in Dataset A

Feature	Meaning
information entropy	Average IDF of the system node
max_number/min	Maximum number of alarms per minute
node_num	Number of nodes in same systems
alert_count	Total number of alarms
alert_type_num	Number of alarm types
start_time	Relative start time
time_duration	Time span (minutes)
serious_num	Number of serious type alarms

Figure 4 Results of feature importance analysis

Table 4 Performance in Datasets A and B

Metrics	Dataset A				Dataset B
Metrics	$P R @ 1$	$P R @ 3$	$P R @ 5$	$M A P$	$P R @ 1$	$P R @ 3$	$P R @ 5$	$M A P$
WFPT-RCA	0.90	0.92	0.96	0.927	0.89	0.95	1.00	0.947
WFPT-RCA (no ASG)	0.64	0.70	0.84	0.727	0.53	0.63	0.74	0.633
WFPT-RCA (no feature analysis)	0.28	0.54	0.90	0.573	—	—	—	—
MicroRCA	0.84	0.92	0.94	0.900	0.79	0.84	0.89	0.840
Microscope	0.82	0.88	0.90	0.867	0.74	0.79	0.84	0.790
Association rules	0.36	0.56	0.78	0.567	0.47	0.58	0.63	0.560

Table 4 Performance in Datasets A and B

Metrics	Dataset A				Dataset B
Metrics	$P R @ 1$	$P R @ 3$	$P R @ 5$	$M A P$	$P R @ 1$	$P R @ 3$	$P R @ 5$	$M A P$
WFPT-RCA	0.90	0.92	0.96	0.927	0.89	0.95	1.00	0.947
WFPT-RCA (no ASG)	0.64	0.70	0.84	0.727	0.53	0.63	0.74	0.633
WFPT-RCA (no feature analysis)	0.28	0.54	0.90	0.573	—	—	—	—
MicroRCA	0.84	0.92	0.94	0.900	0.79	0.84	0.89	0.840
Microscope	0.82	0.88	0.90	0.867	0.74	0.79	0.84	0.790
Association rules	0.36	0.56	0.78	0.567	0.47	0.58	0.63	0.560

Figure 5 Results of each metric for fault location at different q values in Dataset A

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Alarm-Based Root Cause Analysis Based on Weighted Fault Propagation Topology for Distributed Information Network

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