Root Cause Analysis doing the detective work during an incident. It's not just about fixing a bug or resolving an incident; it's about digging deeper to understand why it happened in the first place.
For example, if a website crashes unexpectedly, instead of just restarting the server, a root cause analysis involves examining the server logs, database queries, network traffic and distributed traces to uncover the exact sequence of events that led to the crash.
Solving the underlying cause of incidents usually prevents the same incident to occur again if the same conditions are re-created in the future.
Explore related concepts
Incident
An incident is an unexpected disruption in the normal operation of an application. Incidents can range from complete service outages to performance degradation, and they often require immediate attention to restore normal functionality.
Reliability
Reliability is the ability of an application to consistently 'do what is says on the can'. It's the ability of the application to perform as expected, even when the set of conditions are not optimal. It involves minimizing the occurrence of failures and ensuring that the system can recover quickly when failures happen.
Observability
Observability is the ability to understand how your application is working and behaving in production through telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, wide events, etc.). It enables you detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your app before they impact your users and become problems.