What is Root Cause Analysis: Definition & Examples

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a troubleshooting methodology used in IT and network management to identify the underlying cause of problems or incidents. The goal of root cause analysis is to find the primary reason why an incident occurred so that the proper solutions can be implemented to prevent future issues. Getting to the root of network and system problems enables IT teams to resolve issues more efficiently and reduce disruptions.

So what exactly is root cause analysis and how is it used in network troubleshooting?

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including what is root cause analysis, what is the goal of root cause analysis, how to perform it, methods and examples, and benefits.

What is root cause analysis (RCA)?

Root cause analysis refers to the process of discovering the underlying causes and factors that lead to problems in IT systems and networks so that issues can be addressed at their source. It’s a bit like a doctor not merely stopping at treating the symptom but looking for the actual cause of it.

With RCA, the thought process is that to solve problems effectively, you need more than just a quick fix. Instead, if you thoroughly dig into the root causes of the issue instead of just trying to patch the hole with a plaster, it’s far less likely for those same problems to reoccur.  

Some key characteristics of root cause analysis include:

• Structured investigation: RCA follows defined methods and techniques for gathering data, analyzing evidence, identifying contributing factors, and determining fundamental causes.
• Finding true origins: The goal is to trace problems back to their true underlying sources instead of just addressing surface symptoms. This requires digging deeper through layers of causes and effects.
• Implementing solutions: The end goal is driving actions that create systemic fixes that prevent future incidents, rather than temporary workarounds. 

In the world of network management, some examples of when RCA gets used include:

• Troubleshooting network outages or intermittent network connectivity issues
• Analyzing the factors contributing to slow network performance 
• Investigating the root causes behind repeated server crashes
• Figuring out why certain applications keep freezing randomly

The origins of root cause analysis trace back to the manufacturing industry in the late 1940s when it started getting used to analyze defects and improve production quality. Since then, RCA has become a standard practice for troubleshooting and problem-solving across many industries including healthcare, aviation, energy, and of course, IT.

What is the goal of root cause analysis?

The ultimate goal of performing root cause analysis is to find solutions to problems that address core contributing factors and prevent recurring issues.

More specifically, effective RCA aims to:

Correct faults at source

By targeting true root causes rather than just noticeable symptoms, there is a much lower chance of the same problems happening again. RCA gives teams the ability to resolve issues once and for all instead of applying quick band-aid fixes.

For example, if a server keeps crashing with a generic error, an admin might restart it and get things running again quickly. But odds are high it will fail again soon if they don’t dig into logs and metrics to unravel what is actually causing the crashes at a core software or hardware level.

Taking the time to do RCA right leads to fixing the server issue permanently across the enterprise instead of fighting the frequent fires it causes.

Minimize disruptions

Fixing core issues improves stability and prevents repeated outages and failures down the road. When systems have fewer episodes of unexpected problems, there is less impact on workflows and productivity.

Networks are the lifeblood of modern digital businesses. So when connectivity goes down, processes grind to a halt. If a root bridge failure cuts off access to critical servers, quick fixes might reroute traffic temporarily. But comprehensively analyzing root causes using visual packet analysis could uncover a spanning tree loop that keeps causing root elections.

Addressing fundamental network design issues minimizes the likelihood of ongoing intermittent failures.

Drive informed decisions

Understanding fundamental reasons why issues occur helps IT teams make smarter choices about how to enhance systems and processes going forward. They can better assess risks and validate architecture decisions by learning from the troubleshooting narrative.

For example, server logs might reveal memory leak patterns triggered by a recent security patch deployment. Upon rollback of the faulty update, analysis then shows certain production apps need rearchitecting to work properly in low-memory footprint containers.

Increase efficiency

When underlying causes get addressed upfront through RCA discoveries, less time gets wasted applying incomplete short-term fixes that often miss the mark. Uptime Institute’s 2022 Outage Analysis found that 40% of organizations experienced some form of outage as the result of human error, and, of these, 85% stemmed from procedural failures.  

If support teams didn’t have to keep responding manually to preventable issues caused by gaps in processes and policies, they could proactively apply their skills into value-adding projects. RCA enables more efficiency by revealing the procedural weaknesses contributing to outages so they can be strengthened.

By leveraging RCA to optimize procedures and minimize disruption-causing human errors, teams can focus on improving reliability through automation and self-healing practices rather than repetitive firefighting.

Reduce costs

Preventing recurring incidents is way more cost-effective than continually fighting repetitive fires in terms of paying technicians for overtime hours as well as productivity impacts during application downtime to the business. 

Research indicates the cost of downtime can run from $137 to $427 per minute for small businesses and go all the way up to $16,000 per minute for larger businesses for a relatively short outage. For example, in March 2019, Facebook had a 14-hour outage that cost them almost $90 million. 

The compounded costs quickly get out of control if core issues remain unaddressed. Eliminating the root causes of problems has a direct ROI through significant total-cost-of-ownership savings over years of avoided repeated part replacements, software patches, or manual monitoring.

How do you perform root cause analysis?

Now that you have a better understanding of what RCA is and its goals, let’s look at how it’s done, step by step.

1. Define the problem

Always start by creating a clear, concise problem statement that anyone can understand. Describe the specifics of the incident in business terms, summarizing the impacts, known symptoms, affected areas, relevant times and dates, and anything else relevant. Defining the scope and boundaries upfront prevents going down rabbit holes later on.

For example, say an organization experiences severe latency and outages across customer-facing applications every day between 1–2 PM. An effective problem statement would capture details like the affected apps, the timeframe, primary symptoms, the rough number of impacted customers, and frequency.

2. Gather data

The next critical phase involves collecting all available data related to the problem. This may include event and security logs, topology maps, monitoring metrics, system configs, trouble tickets, asset inventory details, and so on. The more quality information you pull together from multiple sources, the easier it becomes to connect dots, spot hidden trends/relationships, and accurately recreate what transpired.

Leveraging monitoring and observability platforms is hugely beneficial here, as they provide centralized access to various IT data streams through one pane of glass. Keep in mind, though, that when it comes to observability vs monitoring, the former looks at unknowns, making it more valuable to RCA.

The best practice is to gather not just the logs or metrics isolated to the specific incident period, but rather pull historical data from further back as well. Comparing evidence from when things were working fine against data from the problematic timeframe may provide important insights.

3. Map out the incident sequence

With all the evidence compiled, the next task is to organize it sequentially into an incident timeline detailing the series of events that took place leading up to and during the disruption. The play-by-play visualization enables understanding how the situation unfolded and pinpointing exactly when/where things started going wrong. Network visualization makes this easier because it clearly shows the network paths and points of failure.

Look closely for any changes that occurred right before issues arose—like config modifications, patching, onboarding new devices, or network moves/adds/changes. These are common culprits. Sequence mapping also reveals interactions between various components that may have exacerbated the problems. Recreate an accurate narration of precisely how and when aspects failed.

4. Identify contributing factors

Once the detailed incident sequence is mapped out, start analyzing to identify specific elements that likely influenced or amplified the issue. Look for common threads across past related issues that point to systemic gaps. Call out anomalies in the environment, recent network/device changes pertinent to the problem, procedural workarounds, areas of misconfiguration, areas under excess strain, and any warning signs that were missed.

Thorough factor identification exposes strengths/weaknesses in processes, safeguards, governance, and more that should be addressed, which will significantly improve RCA accuracy.

5. Determine the root causes

Now comes the most critical job of the RCA process—drilling down through all the contributing factors to pinpoint the fundamental root cause(s) explaining why the incident was able to happen in the first place. Ask “why” questions about each factor, working backward methodically. The ultimate goal is getting to the origins rather than just reacting to the triggering event on the surface.

Consider if there are multiple underlying failure points that together created the perfect storm. Identify vulnerabilities that were dormant for a while but suddenly materialized under precise conditions. Look past just human or technical errors to understand why they were set up to occur—things such as inadequate training, supervision, and operational governance can be underlying facilitators.

6. Define solutions

For each identified root cause, establish corrective actions that target safeguarding that failure point to prevent the issue from recurring in the future—or at least significantly reduce the probability. These countermeasures should drive procedural changes, system hardening, enhanced infrastructure resilience, stronger operational governance, and improved cross-team coordination.

The solutions defined should aim to harden systems against any vulnerabilities uncovered during root cause analysis. This can involve measures such as building redundancies, strategically segmenting networks, adopting microservices architectures, expanding process validations, formalizing staff training programs, and addressing any other capability gaps surfaced by RCA. 

7. Implement and monitor

The final step is to fully implement the chosen solutions and closely monitor how well they prevent the issues from happening again. Some fixes may need to be tweaked if they only partially resolve things. Pay attention for any new patterns appearing over time that suggest additional problem areas to tackle.

Be sure to update your team’s documentation manuals and troubleshooting playbooks based on RCA takeaways. This way future technicians can benefit from the insights and avoid similar pitfalls. 

Also, build in auditing checks to ensure your new prevention processes stick and don’t fade away months later. And use performance metrics pegged to previous shortfalls to quantify how much reliability, uptime, customer satisfaction levels, and other metrics are actually improving thanks to RCA.

6 root cause analysis methods

IT teams have various structured techniques at their disposal to uncover the underlying causes behind network and system disruptions. Selecting the right root cause analysis methodology depends on the type of problem being investigated and data available.

Five whys 

The Five Whys approach provides a simple but effective way to iteratively drill down to the root of a problem by repeatedly asking “why” at each level. For example, starting with an observation like “application downtime,” keep querying to unpack causal relationships until the true origin is revealed related to some gap or breakdown.

Fishbone diagrams 

Fishbone diagrams visually map out all the potential factors contributing to an incident on categorized “bones” stemming off of the core problem box. This enables simultaneously analyzing relationships across people, processes, systems, external events, etc. to uncover complex interdependencies potentially missed in linear RCA.

Fault tree analysis 

Fault tree analysis models the logical ordering of failures whether stemming from equipment, software bugs, human errors or external events. The visual tree structure quantifies the probability of combinations of these failures ultimately causing the incident. This is helpful for risk assessments.

Change analysis 

Compare the current broken state against a known good baseline to detect areas of change most likely responsible for introducing problems. This contrast analysis isolates what’s different in configurations, topology, data flows, user permissions, and so on. 

Pareto analysis 

Leverage Pareto analysis when dealing with frequent issues but limited time and resources to identify the vital few causing most problems. By ordering severity and frequency visually, the technique highlights the minor causes with outsized impact needing priority remediation.

Observability analytics 

Modern AI-ops-powered network observability platforms accelerate root cause analysis by auto-detecting anomalies, mapping component dependencies, correlating events, and smartly linking symptoms to probable causes using machine learning. This improves understanding while cutting investigation time.

Root cause analysis examples

To better understand how RCA methodologies work, here are some examples of them in action.

Web application outages

When your web application suffers from unexplained outages, you could resort to change analysis to discover the root cause. That means comparing the application’s topology, log flows, and user access rules against a known good state to find where the differences are. 

For example, you may discover that a malfunctioning network switch that wasn’t there before is now disrupting traffic. Review any recent configurations pushed to that switch for errors that could be causing the failure. Tracing changes in the environment is key to finding the source of these web app disruptions.

Slow file transfers

Slow file transfers can often be quickly diagnosed using the five whys analysis. Ask why transfers are slow and you may find the storage area network is sluggish. Pose the same question and you could reveal multiple long-running backup jobs are placing heavy demands during peak hours. 

Ask once more why those jobs aren’t staggered and you may determine that backup policies simply don’t account for normal network usage patterns. Adjusting the backup schedule could be the simplest solution.

Spike in unauthorized logins

When detecting a spike in unauthorized login attempts, visually mapping out a fault tree analysis can trace the roots of the breach. Model out all the prerequisites needed for logins to legitimately occur through your VPN or other access gateways. 

Then layer on points of potential compromise that could allow credentials theft, like phishing attacks or protocol exploits. See where remote access channels converge with weak security controls to quantify breach probabilities. Revisit VPN configurations for missteps allowing exploitation.

Database corruption issues

Fishbone diagrams help trace database corruption issues to their origins across multiple influencing categories. Map out all factors from networking to authentication protocols to DB configurations. Look for intersections, like between recent backend changes and an unpatched database server missing fixes. 

The diagram leads you to ultimately find application code defects allowing data errors to manifest after otherwise innocuous updates. Isolating those integrations reveals where data safeguards need improvement.

Root cause analysis benefits

Your organization can gain many invaluable advantages from regularly implementing root cause analysis, including:

Fewer repeating incidents

Because RCA gets to the true source instead of just reacting to surface issues, you stop the same problems from happening over and over. Your teams spend less time firefighting and more time working on what matters to move the business forward.

Better budget optimization

When your systems run more smoothly with fewer disruptions, expensive overtime costs and major infrastructure overhauls become less necessary. Money gets redirected from short-term patches into innovation that drives growth.

Increased uptime

By thoroughly investigating past outages and strengthening network safeguards accordingly, your mission-critical systems stay available more often. This leads to lower resolution expenses plus improved employee productivity.

Enhanced security

Rigorously evaluating all weaknesses that contributed to breaches helps you intelligently prioritize investments into the cyber protections that will prevent attackers from exploiting those same vulnerabilities again.

Improved team collaboration

When you follow a structured RCA process, it makes it easier to share knowledge across departments and sectors. It’s an objective analysis that shows where there might be issues in processes or insufficient communication between teams, such as failure to communicate incidents, that need to be dealt with, leading to better relationships between departments. 

Higher customer satisfaction

Fewer customer-impacting issues directly translate to happier end-users and stakeholders. Subjecting every major problem to rigorous RCA demonstrates your organization’s unwavering commitment to defining and implementing lasting solutions over temporary quick patches. This focus on quality will improve customer confidence and loyalty.

Competitive advantages

The compounding benefits above like increased uptime, security, innovation velocity, and customer trust gained from RCA ultimately make your IT organization more adaptable, cost-efficient, and better positioned to leverage new opportunities faster than competitors.

The power of performing RCA

Root cause analysis allows you to transform chaotic troubleshooting situations into structured investigations that provide reliable solutions. RCA shifts your focus toward preventative improvements rather than quick fixes to build more resilient networks.

Implementing modern network observability platforms supercharges root cause analysis by automatically connecting disparate data points to accelerate insight discovery so that problems get resolved faster. The outcome is IT professionals having more time and better information to focus on customer-centric initiatives rather than just fighting fires.