# FaultProfIT: Hierarchical Fault Profiling of Incident Tickets in Large-scale Cloud Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17583/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Pre-Trained Models for Chinese Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13922/) (2020)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [Self-Guided Contrastive Learning for BERT Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07345/) (2021)
- [Automatic Root Cause Analysis via Large Language Models for Cloud Incidents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15778/) (2023)
- [CoSQA: 20,000+ Web Queries for Code Search and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13239/) (2021)
- [Incorporating Hierarchy into Text Encoder: a Contrastive Learning Approach for Hierarchical Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03825/) (2022)
- [A Primer on Contrastive Pretraining in Language Processing: Methods, Lessons Learned and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12982/) (2021)
- [Actionable and Interpretable Fault Localization for Recurring Failures in Online Service Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09021/) (2022)
- [Maat: Performance Metric Anomaly Anticipation for Cloud Services with Conditional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07676/) (2023)
- [SoftNER: Mining Knowledge Graphs From Cloud Incidents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05961/) (2021)
- [Incident-aware Duplicate Ticket Aggregation for Cloud Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09520/) (2023)
- [ESRO: Experience Assisted Service Reliability against Outages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07230/) (2023)

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

- [Demystifying and Extracting Fault-indicating Information from Logs for Failure Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13561/) (2024)
- [ASTRA - Agentic System for Ticket Resolution and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28790/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Postmortem analysis is essential in the management of incidents within cloud systems, which provides valuable insights to improve system's reliability and robustness. At CloudA, fault pattern profiling is performed during the postmortem phase, which involves the classification of incidents' faults into unique categories, referred to as fault pattern. By aggregating and analyzing these fault patterns, engineers can discern common faults, vulnerable components and emerging fault trends. However, this process is currently conducted by manual labeling, which has inherent drawbacks. On the one hand, the sheer volume of incidents means only the most severe ones are analyzed, causing a skewed overview of fault patterns. On the other hand, the complexity of the task demands extensive domain knowledge, which leads to errors and inconsistencies. To address these limitations, we propose an automated approach, named FaultProfIT, for Fault pattern Profiling of Incident Tickets. It leverages hierarchy-guided contrastive learning to train a hierarchy-aware incident encoder and predicts fault patterns with enhanced incident representations. We evaluate FaultProfIT using the production incidents from CloudA. The results demonstrate that FaultProfIT outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our ablation study and analysis also verify the effectiveness of hierarchy-guided contrastive learning. Additionally, we have deployed FaultProfIT at CloudA for six months. To date, FaultProfIT has analyzed 10,000+ incidents from 30+ cloud services, successfully revealing several fault trends that have informed system improvements.