Performance antipatterns capture recurring behaviours that degrade software efficiency. Black-box approaches aim to detect such issues without modifying the application. This paper presents B-Perf, a system-level black-box method that reconstructs execution, memory, and messaging behaviour from kernel-level traces. By analysing scheduling, allocation, and communication events, B-Perf derives workload-dependent behavioural trends and reports antipattern indicators grounded in resource usage and contention. To handle large trace volumes, the approach follows a pipeline of workload generation, event gathering, trace handling, and antipattern inference.

Root cause localization in microservices is challenging due to intricate service dependencies and the high volume and heterogeneity of collected monitoring data, which add complexity to the analysis. Conventional methods often overlook nuanced propagation patterns and contextual interactions among services, and they are limited in leveraging multi-source observability data for comprehensive root cause identification. This study introduces CARE, a context-aware, spectrum-analysis-based approach that integrates multi-source observability data and employs network analysis to prioritize the contextual significance of components in propagating anomalies across individual services, service communities, and requests. CARE’s weighted spectrum analysis leverages these prioritized contexts to pinpoint underlying performance issues. Evaluations on 224 cases from the TrainTicket benchmark and a real-world Internet service provider’s production system demonstrate CARE’s substantial accuracy gains, with top-1 accuracy of 72%-89% and top-5 accuracy of 84%-99% for single root causes, outperforming baselines by 8%-41%. CARE also shows significant improvements in dual root cause identification, exceeding baseline performance by 18%-37%, all while maintaining efficient resource usage, establishing CARE as a robust and resource-effective solution for root cause localization in complex microservice environments.