You can use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to filter a set of events to determine the cause of a higher level system, service, or application problem. RCA can help you to eliminate apparent performance problems that may otherwise appear to be root causes but which are only side effects or symptoms of the actual root cause of the problem, allowing you to more quickly identify problem areas. You can view the RCA results on the home page or topology page of any service that is currently down. The topology page allows you to see a graphical representation of the service, system and component dependencies with the target(s) highlighted that RCA has implicated as causing the service failure.
By default, Root Cause Analysis considers the availability of key components to determine whether or not they are causes of service failure. Use the Component Tests page to specify additional conditions, or component tests, for Root Cause Analysis to consider. You can specify additional conditions, or component tests, for Root Cause Analysis to consider. If the key component is unavailable, or if any of your component tests conditions are not met, then this component will be considered a cause of the service failure.
To create a test for the current component, click Add to select a metric to which you can set the threshold conditions for failure. Click Edit to access the Edit Component Test page where you can define the threshold. You can remove a component test by selecting the metric and choosing Remove.
If you specify a test for which there is already a severity threshold set, the threshold is displayed. If no threshold is set, RCA displays a message stating that no threshold is set. You can define the test without a threshold but no evaluation will take place if no severity threshold is set.
You can also specify additional conditions, or component host tests, for the host on which this key component resides. If Root Cause Analysis identifies the key component as a cause of service failure, the component's host will also be analyzed to see if it caused the component, and therefore the service, to fail. You can define additional conditions to help determine whether or not it is the root cause of the failure.
To add component host tests, click the Tests link then add tests on the Component Host Tests page.
Note: Timestamps for causes shown in service pages are normalized to the service time zone, and timestamps for impacted services shown on target pages are normalized to the target time zone. This allows the user the ability to correlate the timestamps between the service and the key components.
Related Topics
About Root Cause Analysis Processing
Getting the Most From Root Cause Analysis
Enterprise Manager Information Roadmap
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