US Patent 10255128 Root cause candidate determination in multiple process systems

Root cause determination in multiple process systems is disclosed. It is determined that a first process encountered a problem at a first point in time. A directed graph that represents each process of a plurality of processes, including the first process, as a corresponding vertex of a plurality of vertices in the directed graph is accessed. A path through the directed graph from a start vertex to an end vertex is determined to identify a subset of processes that correspond to the vertices in the path. Corresponding runtime metric values are accessed to determine whether a runtime metric value is a non-desired value for at least one of the processes in the subset of processes. A process in the subset of processes is identified as a root cause candidate of the problem encountered by the first process.