Localizing and Explaining Faults in Microservices Using Distributed Tracing

Abstract

Finding the exact location of a fault in a large distributed microservices application running in containerized cloud environments can be very difficult and time-consuming. We present a novel approach that uses distributed tracing to automatically detect, localize and aid in explaining application-level faults. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach by injecting faults into a well-known microservice-based benchmark application. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed fault localization algorithm correctly detects and localize the microservice with the injected fault. We also compare our approach with other fault localization methods. In particular, we empirically show that our method outperforms methods in which a graph model of error propagation is used for inferring fault locations using error logs. Our work illustrates the value added by distributed tracing for localizing and explaining faults in microservices.