From the course: Applied AI for IT Operations (AIOps)

What is root cause analysis? - Python Tutorial

From the course: Applied AI for IT Operations (AIOps)

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What is root cause analysis?

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- [Instructor] RCA stands for root cause analysis, and it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is an iterative, interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships of an underlying problem. When a problem happens, what we get to see are the symptoms of the problem. The symptoms need to be mapped to a root cause by asking a series of questions and conducting a set of exploratory tests. This is similar to how a doctor diagnoses a symptom, like a fever, to a root cause, like a viral infection. How does this apply to ITOps? ITOps receives a number of service incidents every day from users. The incidents usually state the symptoms that are observed by the user. ITOps engineers may further analyze the problem to identify more symptoms. Then comes the analysis process of narrowing down the symptom to its root cause. For example, the symptom might be a user seeing a message like, "We are unable to save your changes. "Please contact the administrator." The root cause might be that there is no disk space in the database. The time taken to narrow down the root cause is a significant factor in determining resolution times. It requires expert help, usually the developers of the software or the vendor who supplied the product. That expertise may take some time to come by. AI can help here by looking at the symptoms and predicting the root causes. This helps ITOps to get down to fixing the root cause quickly. In this chapter, we will implement such a use case.

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