Incident management - Activity
RCA
(Root Cause Analysis)
A structured investigation into why a problem happened and what would prevent it happening again
What's it for?
Finds why a serious problem happened so practical changes can reduce the chance of it happening again.
For example…
After a software release fails, the team investigates and finds that an important check was missing and the change had been rushed; both causes are then fixed
After repeated checkout outages, an RCA finds that exhausted database connections were the main cause and identifies the configuration and monitoring changes needed to stop recurrence
Think of it like…
Investigating a kitchen flood: mopping is recovery; finding the burst pipe and weak joint is RCA