Abstract: In one embodiment, an illustrative method herein may comprise: determining, by a process, a directed acyclic graph that defines pathways of telemetry metrics for a given observed system; processing, by the process, telemetry metrics received from distributed sources to detect and localize a problem from the telemetry metrics; consulting, by the process, the directed acyclic graph to find one or more common pathways of the directed acyclic graph that relate to the problem against all other pathways of the directed acyclic graph to establish a reduced telemetry search space corresponding to the one or more common pathways; and enabling, by the process, a root cause analysis operation for the problem based on the reduced telemetry search space.