# MetaRCA: A Generalizable Root Cause Analysis Framework for Cloud-Native Systems Powered by Meta Causal Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02032 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02032/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [PRIM: Meta-Learned Bayesian Root Cause Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08786/) (2026)
- [Beyond Fault Localization: A Trajectory-Level Study of LLM Agents for Microservice Root Cause Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21310/) (2026)
- [EviRCA: Decoupling Evidence Extraction from Reasoning for Microservice Root-Cause Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The dynamics and complexity of cloud-native systems present significant challenges for Root Cause Analysis (RCA). While causality-based RCA methods have shown significant progress in recent years, their practical adoption is fundamentally limited by three intertwined challenges: poor scalability against system complexity, brittle generalization across different system topologies, and inadequate integration of domain knowledge. These limitations create a vicious cycle, hindering the development of robust and efficient RCA solutions. This paper introduces MetaRCA, a generalizable RCA framework for cloud-native systems. MetaRCA first constructs a Meta Causal Graph (MCG) offline, a reusable knowledge base defined at the metadata level. To build the MCG, we propose an evidence-driven algorithm that systematically fuses knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs), historical fault reports, and observability data. When a fault occurs, MetaRCA performs a lightweight online inference by dynamically instantiating the MCG into a localized graph based on the current context, and then leverages real-time data to weight and prune causal links for precise root cause localization. Evaluated on 252 public and 59 production failures, MetaRCA demonstrates state-of-the-art performance. It surpasses the strongest baseline by 29 percentage points in service-level and 48 percentage points in metric-level accuracy. This performance advantage widens as system complexity increases, with its overhead scaling near-linearly. Crucially, MetaRCA shows robust cross-system generalization, maintaining over 80% accuracy across diverse systems.