Does Graph Structure Earn Its Place in Microservice Root-Cause Analysis? A Controlled Study on RCAEval, and What the Benchmark Was Really Measuring

Imad Buljić

Graph neural networks dominate recent work on microservice root-cause analysis, yet recent results question whether the graph contributes. Those results compare whole pipelines, so when a flat model wins one cannot tell whether structure is useless or redundant. We run the comparison they imply on RCAEval: three learned arms with identical features, optimiser, validation split, early-stopping rule and scoring head, in which a single term separates the graph arms. Across two RCAEval benchmarks, two topology sources and four regimes we find no reliable graph-specific effect: in-distribution the graph model leads the conventional flat model by 0.003 Avg@5 (p = 0.844, n = 6 disjoint folds). Auditing the pipeline surfaced two benchmark properties that condition any result on it. RCAEval injects faults into only five services per system while exposing 12 to 70 in telemetry, and the headline metric is Avg@5: a ranker reading no telemetry at all places the true culprit in the top five on 99.7 percent of held-out incidents, scoring Avg@5 0.488. That prior, not the uniform-random 0.137, is the honest in-distribution floor, and it collapses to 0.192 across systems. The second property is a…