An Uncertainty-Aware Resilience Micro-Agent for Causal Observability in the Computing Continuum

Failures are the norm in highly complex and heterogeneous devices spanning the distributed computing continuum (DCC), from resource-constrained IoT and edge nodes to high-performance computing systems. Ensuring reliability and global consistency across these layers remains a major challenge, especially for AI-driven workloads requiring real-time, adaptive coordination. This work-in-progress paper introduces a Probabilistic Active Inference Resilience Agent (PAIR-Agent) to achieve resilience in DCC systems. PAIR-Agent performs three core operations: (i) constructing a causal fault graph from device logs, (ii) identifying faults while managing certainties and uncertainties using Markov blankets and the free energy principle, and (iii) autonomously healing issues through active inference. Through continuous monitoring and adaptive reconfiguration, the agent maintains service continuity and stability under diverse failure conditions. Theoretical validations confirm the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed framework.

AI agents deployed into SRE workflows currently derive their understanding of environment state from raw observability telemetry at query time, paying a semantic-interpretation tax in tokens, latency, and inferential reliability. We propose Causely, a causal intelligence layer that maintains a structured representation of environment topology, attribute dependencies, and causal relationships that are anchroed to a ontological representation of the managed environment. Causely transforms raw telemetry into a live, queryable model providing the semantic and causal foundation AI agents require to diagnose, evaluate impact, and act safely in production. We evaluate this value proposition through a benchmark study conducted in a controlled setting with injected faults in a 24-microservice OpenTelemetry demo application. Our experiments compare four agent configurations (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, HolmesGPT with Sonnet and Gemini backends). Experiments are run with and without access to Causely under two scenarios: an active incident and a healthy baseline. On the active-fault scenario, causal grounding reduces mean time-to-diagnosis by 63%, mean token consumption by 60%, and mean tool-call count by 78%, compressing the investigation footprint by 4.8$\times$ and lowering direct API cost per run by 57%; root-cause-diagnosis accuracy rises from 75% to 100%.

LLM-based root cause analysis (RCA) agents have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for incident diagnosis in microservice AIOps. However, their reliability remains fragile: an error in early evidence collection, hypothesis formulation, or causal analysis can propagate through the reasoning trace and eventually corrupt the final diagnosis. In this paper, we present \textbf{STAR}, a \emph{Stage-attributed Triage and Repair} framework for repairing erroneous RCA traces. STAR explicitly decomposes an RCA workflow into four structured stages, namely \emph{Evidence Package} (EP), \emph{Hypothesis Set} (HS), \emph{Analysis Structure} (AS), and \emph{Decision Report} (DR), and treats agent failure as a stage-localizable reasoning bug rather than a monolithic end-to-end error. Built on top of LangGraph, STAR performs stage-wise auditing, budget-aware \emph{Fast/Slow Routing}, \emph{decisive stage localization via counterfactual candidate evaluation}, and stage-specific patch-and-replay repair. We evaluate STAR on a public large-scale benchmark and a real-world production dataset, using two RCA agent workflows and three foundation models. Experimental results show that STAR consistently improves both root cause localization and fault type classification over strong baselines. Moreover, STAR identifies the decisive faulty stage with high accuracy, repairs most initially incorrect traces within one or two replay rounds, and benefits substantially from both Fast/Slow Routing and counterfactual stage evaluation. These results suggest that explicitly modeling \emph{where} an RCA agent fails is an effective path toward reliable, debuggable, and self-repairing agentic RCA systems.