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Lingzhe Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Lingzhe Zhang.

29 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

MicroRemed: Benchmarking LLMs in Microservices Remediation

Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with agent-based reasoning frameworks have recently shown strong potential for autonomous decision-making and system-level operations. One promising yet underexplored direction is microservice remediation, where the goal is to automatically recover faulty microservice systems. Existing approaches, however, still rely on human-crafted prompts from Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), with LLMs merely converting textual instructions into executable code. To advance research in this area, we introduce MicroRemed, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs in end-to-end microservice remediation, where models must directly generate executable Ansible playbooks from diagnosis reports to restore system functionality. We further propose ThinkRemed, a multi-agent framework that emulates the reflective and perceptive reasoning of SREs. Experimental results show that MicroRemed presents substantial challenges to current LLMs, while ThinkRemed improves end-to-end remediation performance through iterative reasoning and system reflection. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/LLM4AIOps/MicroRemed.

cs.CL↗

LogAction: Consistent Cross-system Anomaly Detection through Logs via Active Domain Adaptation

Log-based anomaly detection is a essential task for ensuring the reliability and performance of software systems. However, the performance of existing anomaly detection methods heavily relies on labeling, while labeling a large volume of logs is highly challenging. To address this issue, many approaches based on transfer learning and active learning have been proposed. Nevertheless, their effectiveness is hindered by issues such as the gap between source and target system data distributions and cold-start problems. In this paper, we propose LogAction, a novel log-based anomaly detection model based on active domain adaptation. LogAction integrates transfer learning and active learning techniques. On one hand, it uses labeled data from a mature system to train a base model, mitigating the cold-start issue in active learning. On the other hand, LogAction utilize free energy-based sampling and uncertainty-based sampling to select logs located at the distribution boundaries for manual labeling, thus addresses the data distribution gap in transfer learning with minimal human labeling efforts. Experimental results on six different combinations of datasets demonstrate that LogAction achieves an average 93.01% F1 score with only 2% of manual labels, outperforming some state-of-the-art methods by 26.28%. Website: https://logaction.github.io

cs.LG↗

Walk the Talk: Is Your Log-based Software Reliability Maintenance System Really Reliable?

Log-based software reliability maintenance systems are crucial for sustaining stable customer experience. However, existing deep learning-based methods represent a black box for service providers, making it impossible for providers to understand how these methods detect anomalies, thereby hindering trust and deployment in real production environments. To address this issue, this paper defines a trustworthiness metric, diagnostic faithfulness, for models to gain service providers' trust, based on surveys of SREs at a major cloud provider. We design two evaluation tasks: attention-based root cause localization and event perturbation. Empirical studies demonstrate that existing methods perform poorly in diagnostic faithfulness. Consequently, we propose FaithLog, a faithful log-based anomaly detection system, which achieves faithfulness through a carefully designed causality-guided attention mechanism and adversarial consistency learning. Evaluation results on two public datasets and one industrial dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in diagnostic faithfulness.

cs.SE↗

United We Stand: Towards End-to-End Log-based Fault Diagnosis via Interactive Multi-Task Learning

Log-based fault diagnosis is essential for maintaining software system availability. However, existing fault diagnosis methods are built using a task-independent manner, which fails to bridge the gap between anomaly detection and root cause localization in terms of data form and diagnostic objectives, resulting in three major issues: 1) Diagnostic bias accumulates in the system; 2) System deployment relies on expensive monitoring data; 3) The collaborative relationship between diagnostic tasks is overlooked. Facing this problems, we propose a novel end-to-end log-based fault diagnosis method, Chimera, whose key idea is to achieve end-to-end fault diagnosis through bidirectional interaction and knowledge transfer between anomaly detection and root cause localization. Chimera is based on interactive multi-task learning, carefully designing interaction strategies between anomaly detection and root cause localization at the data, feature, and diagnostic result levels, thereby achieving both sub-tasks interactively within a unified end-to-end framework. Evaluation on two public datasets and one industrial dataset shows that Chimera outperforms existing methods in both anomaly detection and root cause localization, achieving improvements of over 2.92% - 5.00% and 19.01% - 37.09%, respectively. It has been successfully deployed in production, serving an industrial cloud platform.

cs.SE↗

Adaptive Root Cause Localization for Microservice Systems with Multi-Agent Recursion-of-Thought

As contemporary microservice systems become increasingly popular and complex-often comprising hundreds or even thousands of fine-grained, interdependent subsystems-they are facing more frequent failures. Ensuring system reliability thus demands accurate root cause localization. While traces and metrics have proven to be effective data sources for this task, existing methods either heavily rely on pre-defined schemas, which struggle to adapt to evolving operational contexts, or lack interpretability in their reasoning process, thereby leaving Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) confused. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on how SREs localize the root cause of failures, drawing insights from multiple professional SREs across different organizations. Our investigation reveals that human root cause analysis exhibits three key characteristics: recursiveness, multi-dimensional expansion, and cross-modal reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we introduce RCLAgent, an adaptive root cause localization method for microservice systems that leverages a multi-agent recursion-of-thought framework. RCLAgent employs a novel recursion-of-thought strategy to guide the LLM's reasoning process, effectively integrating data from multiple agents and tool-assisted analysis to accurately pinpoint the root cause. Experimental evaluations on various public datasets demonstrate that RCLAgent achieves superior performance by localizing the root cause using only a single request-outperforming state-of-the-art methods that depend on aggregating multiple requests. These results underscore the effectiveness of RCLAgent in enhancing the efficiency and precision of root cause localization in complex microservice environments.

cs.SE↗

A Survey of AIOps in the Era of Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) grow increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, their application to various Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) tasks has garnered significant attention. However, a comprehensive understanding of the impact, potential, and limitations of LLMs in AIOps remains in its infancy. To address this gap, we conducted a detailed survey of LLM4AIOps, focusing on how LLMs can optimize processes and improve outcomes in this domain. We analyzed 183 research papers published between January 2020 and December 2024 to answer four key research questions (RQs). In RQ1, we examine the diverse failure data sources utilized, including advanced LLM-based processing techniques for legacy data and the incorporation of new data sources enabled by LLMs. RQ2 explores the evolution of AIOps tasks, highlighting the emergence of novel tasks and the publication trends across these tasks. RQ3 investigates the various LLM-based methods applied to address AIOps challenges. Finally, RQ4 reviews evaluation methodologies tailored to assess LLM-integrated AIOps approaches. Based on our findings, we discuss the state-of-the-art advancements and trends, identify gaps in existing research, and propose promising directions for future exploration.

cs.SE↗

LogDB: Multivariate Log-based Failure Diagnosis for Distributed Databases (Extended from MultiLog)

Distributed databases, as the core infrastructure software for internet applications, play a critical role in modern cloud services. However, existing distributed databases frequently experience system failures and performance degradation, often leading to significant economic losses. Log data, naturally generated within systems, can effectively reflect internal system states. In practice, operators often manually inspect logs to monitor system behavior and diagnose anomalies, a process that is labor-intensive and costly. Although various log-based failure diagnosis methods have been proposed, they are generally not tailored for database systems and fail to fully exploit the internal characteristics and distributed nature of these systems. To address this gap, we propose LogDB, a log-based failure diagnosis method specifically designed for distributed databases. LogDB extracts and compresses log features at each database node and then aggregates these features at the master node to diagnose cluster-wide anomalies. Experiments conducted on the open-source distributed database system Apache IoTDB demonstrate that LogDB achieves robust failure diagnosis performance across different workloads and a variety of anomaly types.

cs.DB↗

AgentFM: Role-Aware Failure Management for Distributed Databases with LLM-Driven Multi-Agents

Distributed databases are critical infrastructures for today's large-scale software systems, making effective failure management essential to ensure software availability. However, existing approaches often overlook the role distinctions within distributed databases and rely on small-scale models with limited generalization capabilities. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary empirical study to emphasize the unique significance of different roles. Building on this insight, we propose AgentFM, a role-aware failure management framework for distributed databases powered by LLM-driven multi-agents. AgentFM addresses failure management by considering system roles, data roles, and task roles, with a meta-agent orchestrating these components. Preliminary evaluations using Apache IoTDB demonstrate the effectiveness of AgentFM and open new directions for further research.

cs.SE↗

Reducing Events to Augment Log-based Anomaly Detection Models: An Empirical Study

As software systems grow increasingly intricate, the precise detection of anomalies have become both essential and challenging. Current log-based anomaly detection methods depend heavily on vast amounts of log data leading to inefficient inference and potential misguidance by noise logs. However, the quantitative effects of log reduction on the effectiveness of anomaly detection remain unexplored. Therefore, we first conduct a comprehensive study on six distinct models spanning three datasets. Through the study, the impact of log quantity and their effectiveness in representing anomalies is qualifies, uncovering three distinctive log event types that differently influence model performance. Drawing from these insights, we propose LogCleaner: an efficient methodology for the automatic reduction of log events in the context of anomaly detection. Serving as middleware between software systems and models, LogCleaner continuously updates and filters anti-events and duplicative-events in the raw generated logs. Experimental outcomes highlight LogCleaner's capability to reduce over 70% of log events in anomaly detection, accelerating the model's inference speed by approximately 300%, and universally improving the performance of models for anomaly detection.

cs.SE↗

A Survey of AIOps for Failure Management in the Era of Large Language Models

As software systems grow increasingly intricate, Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) methods have been widely used in software system failure management to ensure the high availability and reliability of large-scale distributed software systems. However, these methods still face several challenges, such as lack of cross-platform generality and cross-task flexibility. Fortunately, recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) can significantly address these challenges, and many approaches have already been proposed to explore this field. However, there is currently no comprehensive survey that discusses the differences between LLM-based AIOps and traditional AIOps methods. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of AIOps technology for failure management in the LLM era. It includes a detailed definition of AIOps tasks for failure management, the data sources for AIOps, and the LLM-based approaches adopted for AIOps. Additionally, this survey explores the AIOps subtasks, the specific LLM-based approaches suitable for different AIOps subtasks, and the challenges and future directions of the domain, aiming to further its development and application.

cs.SE↗

Multivariate Log-based Anomaly Detection for Distributed Database

Distributed databases are fundamental infrastructures of today's large-scale software systems such as cloud systems. Detecting anomalies in distributed databases is essential for maintaining software availability. Existing approaches, predominantly developed using Loghub-a comprehensive collection of log datasets from various systems-lack datasets specifically tailored to distributed databases, which exhibit unique anomalies. Additionally, there's a notable absence of datasets encompassing multi-anomaly, multi-node logs. Consequently, models built upon these datasets, primarily designed for standalone systems, are inadequate for distributed databases, and the prevalent method of deeming an entire cluster anomalous based on irregularities in a single node leads to a high false-positive rate. This paper addresses the unique anomalies and multivariate nature of logs in distributed databases. We expose the first open-sourced, comprehensive dataset with multivariate logs from distributed databases. Utilizing this dataset, we conduct an extensive study to identify multiple database anomalies and to assess the effectiveness of state-of-the-art anomaly detection using multivariate log data. Our findings reveal that relying solely on logs from a single node is insufficient for accurate anomaly detection on distributed database. Leveraging these insights, we propose MultiLog, an innovative multivariate log-based anomaly detection approach tailored for distributed databases. Our experiments, based on this novel dataset, demonstrate MultiLog's superiority, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods by approximately 12%.

cs.SE↗