# CMMD: Cross-Metric Multi-Dimensional Root Cause Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16280 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16280/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Graph Neural Network-Based Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06947/) (2021)
- [Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07719/) (2021)
- [A Multimodal Anomaly Detector for Robot-Assisted Feeding Using an LSTM-based Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00614/) (2017)
- [A Deep Neural Network for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis in Multivariate Time Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08055/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [OmniConsistency: Learning Style-Agnostic Consistency from Paired Stylization Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18445/) (2025)
- [Interaction Field Matching: Overcoming Limitations of Electrostatic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02950/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In large-scale online services, crucial metrics, a.k.a., key performance indicators (KPIs), are monitored periodically to check their running statuses. Generally, KPIs are aggregated along multiple dimensions and derived by complex calculations among fundamental metrics from the raw data. Once abnormal KPI values are observed, root cause analysis (RCA) can be applied to identify the reasons for anomalies, so that we can troubleshoot quickly. Recently, several automatic RCA techniques were proposed to localize the related dimensions (or a combination of dimensions) to explain the anomalies. However, their analyses are limited to the data on the abnormal metric and ignore the data of other metrics which may be also related to the anomalies, leading to imprecise or even incorrect root causes. To this end, we propose a cross-metric multi-dimensional root cause analysis method, named CMMD, which consists of two key components: 1) relationship modeling, which utilizes graph neural network (GNN) to model the unknown complex calculation among metrics and aggregation function among dimensions from historical data; 2) root cause localization, which adopts the genetic algorithm to efficiently and effectively dive into the raw data and localize the abnormal dimension(s) once the KPI anomalies are detected. Experiments on synthetic datasets, public datasets and online production environment demonstrate the superiority of our proposed CMMD method compared with baselines. Currently, CMMD is running as an online service in Microsoft Azure.