Symmetry, Vol. 18, Pages 87: CPU-Only Spatiotemporal Anomaly Detection in Microservice Systems via Dynamic Graph Neural Networks and LSTM

Symmetry doi: 10.3390/sym18010087

Authors:
Jiaqi Zhang
Hao Yang

Microservice architecture has become a foundational component of modern distributed systems due to its modularity, scalability, and deployment flexibility. However, the increasing complexity and dynamic nature of service interactions have introduced substantial challenges in accurately detecting runtime anomalies. Existing methods often rely on multiple monitoring metrics, which introduce redundancy and noise while increasing the complexity of data collection and model design. This paper proposes a novel spatiotemporal anomaly detection framework that integrates Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (D-GNN) combined with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to model both the structural dependencies and temporal evolution of microservice behaviors. Unlike traditional approaches, our method uses only CPU utilization as the sole monitoring metric, leveraging its high observability and strong correlation with service performance. From a symmetry perspective, normal microservice behaviors exhibit approximately symmetric spatiotemporal patterns: structurally similar services tend to share similar CPU trajectories, and recurring workload cycles induce quasi-periodic temporal symmetries in utilization signals. Runtime anomalies can therefore be interpreted as symmetry-breaking events that create localized structural and temporal asymmetries in the service graph. The proposed framework is explicitly designed to exploit such symmetry properties: the D-GNN component respects permutation symmetry on the microservice graph while embedding the evolving structural context of each service, and the LSTM module captures shift-invariant temporal trends in CPU usage to highlight asymmetric deviations over time. Experiments conducted on real-world microservice datasets demonstrate that the proposed method delivers excellent performance, achieving 98 percent accuracy and 98 percent F1-score. Compared to baseline methods such as DeepTraLog, which achieves 0.93 precision, 0.978 recall, and 0.954 F1-score, our approach performs competitively, achieving 0.980 precision, 0.980 recall, and 0.980 F1-score. Our results indicate that a single-metric, symmetry-aware spatiotemporal modeling approach can achieve competitive performance without the complexity of multi-metric inputs, providing a lightweight and robust solution for real-time anomaly detection in large-scale microservice environments.

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