| name | simulation-output-analyst |
| description | Interpret DSDS simulation outputs including summary metrics, per-node time series, traces, causal graphs, and invariant breaches. Use when reviewing run results, comparing design alternatives, diagnosing bottlenecks, and proposing mitigation steps. |
Simulation Output Analyst
Overview
Analyze DSDS run outputs to identify bottlenecks, cascade roots, and mitigation priority. Produce evidence-backed findings from summary metrics, time series, traces, and causal artifacts.
Workflow
- Verify run context
- Record scenario name, seed, duration, workload shape, and injected faults.
- Confirm comparison baseline before judging regressions.
- Triage global health
- Check throughput, error rate, and latency percentiles first.
- Flag immediate SLO and invariant violations.
- Localize bottlenecks
- Rank nodes by utilization, queue depth, rejection rate, and service-time inflation.
- Rank edges by latency growth, packet loss, and concurrency saturation.
- Reconstruct failure chain
- Use traces and causal graph to determine trigger, first-order impact, and propagation path.
- Distinguish root cause from secondary symptoms (for example retry amplification).
- Recommend mitigations
- Provide prioritized actions:
Now: stop-the-bleed changes.Next: structural fixes.Later: optimization and cost tuning.- Tie each action to the metric or failure mode it addresses.
- Produce report
- Include findings by severity, evidence table, confidence level, unknowns, and next scenarios to verify fixes.
Analysis guardrails
- Do not claim causality without time-ordered evidence.
- Separate observed facts from inference.
- Call out missing telemetry explicitly.
References
- Read
references/output-analysis-playbook.md for checklist and report template.
- Use these repo sources:
docs/SYSTEM_OVERVIEW.md (analysis layer expectations)canonical-catalogue/DSDS Canonical Catalogue - Metrics & SLIs.csvcanonical-catalogue/DSDS Canonical Catalogue - Simulation outputs.csvplanning/IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md (Phase 6)
