Graph Neural AI with Temporal Dynamics for Comprehensive Anomaly Detection in Microservices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified graph neural network framework with temporal modeling for effective anomaly detection and root cause analysis in microservice architectures, handling complex dependencies and dynamic environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel combination of graph neural networks and temporal modeling to improve anomaly detection and root cause tracing in microservices.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods in AUC, ACC, Recall, and F1-Score.

Maintains high accuracy and stability under dynamic topologies.

Effectively captures complex structural and temporal dependencies.

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of anomaly detection and root cause tracing in microservice architectures and proposes a unified framework that combines graph neural networks with temporal modeling. The microservice call chain is abstracted as a directed graph, where multidimensional features of nodes and edges are used to construct a service topology representation, and graph convolution is applied to aggregate features across nodes and model dependencies, capturing complex structural relationships among services. On this basis, gated recurrent units are introduced to model the temporal evolution of call chains, and multi-layer stacking and concatenation operations are used to jointly obtain structural and temporal representations, improving the ability to identify anomaly patterns. Furthermore, anomaly scoring functions at both the node and path levels are defined to achieve unified modeling from local anomaly detection to global call chain tracing, which enables the identification of abnormal service nodes and the reconstruction of potential anomaly propagation paths. Sensitivity experiments are then designed from multiple dimensions, including hyperparameters, environmental disturbances, and data distribution, to evaluate the framework, and results show that it outperforms baseline methods in key metrics such as AUC, ACC, Recall, and F1-Score, maintaining high accuracy and stability under dynamic topologies and complex environments. This research not only provides a new technical path for anomaly detection in microservices but also lays a methodological foundation for intelligent operations in distributed systems.