Incident management - Concept
Root cause
The underlying cause of an issue, failure or unwanted outcome
What's it for?
Identifies the underlying reason a problem happened so the real cause can be addressed rather than only the symptom.
For example…
A full disk caused the outage because an old cleanup job had failed
The visible symptom is slow reports, but the root cause is a database index accidentally removed during deployment
Think of it like…
Treating fever versus finding the infection — easing symptoms helps, but the fever returns until you treat the source