Research topic
This topic gathers work on understanding multi-service applications through distributed traces, service-invocation graphs, profiling metrics, and performance models. The papers address latency variation, service interactions, anomaly detection, trace reduction, and root-cause localization in microservice environments.
Related search terms: microservice systems · microservice performance · distributed service analysis
12 papers in this topic, ordered newest first. The detailed paper records contain the evidence-grounded methods, tools, datasets, findings, and citation guidance.
2026 · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
CARE combines distributed traces and profiling metrics with graph- and spectrum-based analysis to localize performance root causes in microservices.
Keywords: distributed traces · profiling metrics · context-aware RCA · microservice diagnosis · TrainTicket
2026 · Journal of Systems and Software
DTraComp is an open-source Eclipse Trace Compass framework that compares groups of distributed requests and attributes span time to user-space, kernel, thread-state, and system-call evidence.
Keywords: DTraComp · distributed trace comparison · OpenTracing · LTTng · LTTng-UST
2026 · SIGSOFT FSE Companion
The paper reframes performance debugging as collaborative reasoning over multiple evidence-grounded hypotheses rather than optimization for one supposedly best explanation.
Keywords: performance debugging · collaborative reasoning · AgentDebug · Reasoning Surface · hypothesis generation
2025 · Authorea preprint
The preprint combines communication-related kernel/system-call events with distributed traces to detect communication performance anti-patterns in microservices.
Keywords: communication anti-patterns · DeathStarBench · LTTng · Trace Compass · Jaeger
2025 · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
HybridRCA combines critical-path-aware span analysis with targeted kernel metrics to reduce production trace volume while preserving root-cause localization evidence.
Keywords: critical path · hybrid tracing · production microservices · LTTng · OpenTracing
2025 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)
The paper applies graph attention networks to predict future interactions in microservice call graphs, supporting proactive monitoring.
Keywords: microservice call graphs · link prediction · graph attention networks · temporal segmentation · negative sampling
2024 · ACM/SPEC ICPE Companion
The paper identifies response-time variability in Alibaba microservice traces through critical-path extraction and variability analysis of service interactions.
Keywords: Alibaba microservice architecture · critical path · distributed traces · response-time variability · critical interactions
2024 · The 37th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence
The paper uses gradient boosting and feature importance to reduce the amount of trace data needed for microservice performance modeling.
Keywords: trace data volume · feature importance · CPU demand · memory demand · Alibaba microservices
2024 · ACM/SPEC ICPE Companion
The work-in-progress paper combines service-call graph context, social-network analysis, and spectrum-based fault localization to rank distributed-trace root causes.
Keywords: context-aware RCA · service-call graph · distributed traces · service communities · Louvain
2024 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) Companion
The paper combines an unsupervised GraphSAGE model with critical-path-specific latency profiles to detect anomalous requests and rank likely microservice culprits without labelled training data.
Keywords: latency culprit ranking · distributed traces · GraphSAGE · graph neural networks · critical path
2024 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) Companion
The paper applies graph community detection and service-graph clustering to expose recurring microservice communication structures in an Alibaba production-cluster snapshot.
Keywords: microservice networks · Alibaba production clusters · service call graphs · community detection · Louvain
2021 · Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
The paper correlates LTTng traces from user space through kernel, storage, network, and multiple hosts in a disk-backed state model, enabling top-down diagnosis of distributed request latency.
Keywords: distributed requests · multilevel trace analysis · LTTng · Apache · PHP