PA-Rank: A GAN and Reinforcement Learning Powered Framework for Multimetric Anomaly Detection and Causal Diagnosis

The increasing scale and complexity of modern IT systems necessitate advanced solutions for monitoring and managing performance anomalies. Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of IT operations. However, existing methods struggle with effectively detecting anomalies in multidimensional performance data and accurately identifying their root causes in complex interdependent systems. This article proposes a novel framework, PA-Rank, that combines generative adversarial networks (GANs), reinforcement learning, and graph-based methods to address these challenges comprehensively. For anomaly detection, an unsupervised GAN-based model is developed to identify anomalous time periods and assign weighted scores to metrics, facilitating precise anomaly identification. For root cause localization, a causal graph construction model (CGCM) has been developed, utilizing a reinforcement learning-based causal discovery method that is integrated with graph attention networks (GAT) to construct a causal graph representing the relationships between metrics. A random walk algorithm further ranks metric importance during anomalies, enabling effective root cause localization. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets, including server machine dataset (SMD), ASD, and DAMADICS, demonstrate the superiority of PA-Rank over traditional statistical and state-of-the-art machine learning methods. On the SMD dataset, the proposed framework achieved an F1 score of 0.9542 for anomaly detection and consistently identified root causes among top-ranked candidates on the Pymicro and RMS datasets with the highest PR@Avg scores. These results underscore PA-Rank’s efficacy in diagnosing performance anomalies and supporting efficient system maintenance.