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Mining Root Cause Knowledge from Cloud Service Incident Investigations for AIOps

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of any service-disrupting incident is one of the most critical as well as complex tasks in IT processes, especially for cloud industry leaders like Salesforce. Typically RCA investigation leverages data-sources like application error logs or service call traces. However a rich goldmine of root cause information is also hidden in the natural language documentation of the past incidents investigations by domain experts. This is generally termed as Problem Review Board (PRB) Data which constitute a core component of IT Incident Management. However, owing to the raw unstructured nature of PRBs, such root cause knowledge is not directly reusable by manual or automated pipelines for RCA of new incidents. This motivates us to leverage this widely-available data-source to build an Incident Causation Analysis (ICA) engine, using SoTA neural NLP techniques to extract targeted information and construct a structured Causal Knowledge Graph from PRB documents. ICA forms the backbone of a simple-yet-effective Retrieval based RCA for new incidents, through an Information Retrieval system to search and rank past incidents and detect likely root causes from them, given the incident symptom. In this work, we present ICA and the downstream Incident Search and Retrieval based RCA pipeline, built at Salesforce, over 2K documented cloud service incident investigations collected over a few years. We also establish the effectiveness of ICA and the downstream tasks through various quantitative benchmarks, qualitative analysis as well as domain expert's validation and real incident case studies after deployment.