Example of causal graph

[maralski]

Hey all, I tried producing a causal graph from 10 micro services using 1 minute response time data. Thought you might be interested in the results.

Here is the graph produced by PyRCA.

Here is the ground truth.

Ground truth comes from New Relic APM.

[yangwenz]

Hi, this is a very interesting example. Clearly, some connections are incorrect. To get a more accurate result, we usually need to add some domain knowledge constraints, for example, checkout_service -> store-frontend. You can iteratively revise the graph with more domain knowledge. In our internal use case, we do this multiple times and get a deeper understanding of our system at the end.

[maralski]

I didn't expected the causal graph to work from metrics. The example underscores the importance of distributed traces to establish causal relationships.

[yangwenz]

The causal discovery methods highly depend on some assumptions about the data. In practice, it may always generate wrong edges due to data issues. But if we utilize domain knowledge as well, it can indeed obtain more reliable results.