# How Far Can Root Cause Analysis Go on Real-World Telemetry Data?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13548 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13548/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [RCAEval: A Benchmark for Root Cause Analysis of Microservice Systems with Telemetry Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17015/) (2024)
- [TAMO: Fine-Grained Root Cause Analysis via Tool-Assisted LLM Agent with Multi-Modality Observation Data in Cloud-Native Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20462/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Root Cause Localization for Microservice Systems with Multi-Agent Recursion-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20370/) (2025)
- [GALA: Can Graph-Augmented Large Language Model Agentic Workflows Elevate Root Cause Analysis?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12472/) (2025)
- [TelecomTS: A Multi-Modal Observability Dataset for Time Series and Language Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06063/) (2025)
- [LO2: Microservice API Anomaly Dataset of Logs and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12067/) (2025)
- [Root Cause Analysis for Microservice Systems via Cascaded Conditional Learning with Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17566/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Identifying root causes in production microservice failures requires reasoning over large-scale, multimodal telemetry spanning metrics, logs, and traces, a problem that has proved resistant to both classical and LLM-based approaches. The OpenRCA dataset exemplifies these challenges: it is large-scale, multimodal, and lacks detailed domain knowledge, and yields consistently low accuracy across all existing methods. We show that classical causal discovery methods and existing LLM-based multi-agent systems fail to reliably identify root causes on this benchmark, and present a Structured Multi-Agent RCA pipeline that substantially outperforms existing LLM-based and classical baselines, supporting both domain-knowledge and knowledge-free operating modes. To diagnose where failures originate, we introduce a reverse reasoning agent that, given the correct answer, identifies which signals in the extracted anomalies support it and determines whether Stage~1 had access to those signals, classifying each failure as Reasoning Gap (evidence present but unused) or Data Ambiguity (evidence genuinely absent). This analysis reveals that the required evidence is present in the vast majority of failures: the bottleneck is not data access but the agent's ability to reason over it correctly. We further introduce an automated rule mining pipeline that systematically extracts discrimination rules from reverse reasoning reports, reducing reliance on manual knowledge curation. Across all configurations, model reasoning capability and domain knowledge are the primary constraints: stronger models embed more domain expertise, and explicit knowledge injection partially compensates for this gap. Reasoning performance remains practically bounded even when evidence extraction is perfect: scaffold engineering and better data pipelines alone cannot close this gap; progress requires improvements at the model level.