Causality between violations and failure factors in cloud service and its analysis methods: a survey

Causality is the relation of inevitability between violations of service and failure-factors. It is evidence of accountability in cloud service because compared with correlation, the causality shows more probative capability in evidentiary capability. This paper surveys the causality in recent research, including the features, patterns, and hypotheses of causality, and also the methods of discovery and analysis. Most research focuses on a single causal feature and the patterns of causality in typical violations, such as long tails, lack of resources, etc., and need to explore further the differences in causal patterns in different situations. At last, the results are proposed in this paper, including a taxonomy and some challenges in recent research, and an approach to causality analysis.