Agentic Structured Graph Traversal for Root Cause Analysis of Code-related Incidents in Cloud Applications

Abstract: Cloud incidents pose major operational challenges in production, with unresolved production cloud incidents cost on average over $2M per hour. Prior research identifies code- and configuration-related issues as the predominant category of root causes in cloud incidents. This paper introduces PRAXIS, an orchestrator that manages and deploys an agentic workflow for diagnosing code- and configuration-caused cloud incidents. PRAXIS employs an LLM-driven structured traversal over two types of graph: (1) a service dependency graph (SDG) that captures microservice-level dependencies; and (2) a hammock-block program dependence graph (PDG) that captures code-level dependencies for each microservice. Together, these graphs encode microservice- and code-level dependencies and the LLM acts as a traversal policy over these graphs, moving between services and code dependencies to localize and explain failures. Compared to state-of-the-art ReAct baselines, PRAXIS improves RCA accuracy by up to 3.1x while reducing token consumption by 3.8x. PRAXIS is demonstrated on a set of 30 comprehensive real-world incidents that is being compiled into an RCA benchmark.