Identifying the root cause of an issue observed during application execution

By monitoring requests to and from components of an application, an application analysis engine generates an inter-component graph for an application that identifies how the various components in the application are connected. When a performance issue is detected in association with the application, a traversal module traverses the inter-component graph to determine the possible execution paths that may have been the cause of the detected issue. The traversal module transmits requests to the correlation module to compare the metrics time series of the different components in the execution path with the detected issue. The correlation module compares metrics time series with the issue metric to identify correlations between execution patterns. The results of the correlation may be presented in a report that visually identify the root cause of the detected issues.