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

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.
Keywords: distributed information network; alarm; graph; root cause analysis; random walk