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.
Use the Root Cause Analysis Details page to display additional details related to a specific run of RCA, including the steps taken and any exceptions encountered during the RCA run. You can access this page from the Alert Details page if RCA causes are shown. You can also access this page from the Service Home page. This page shows the context of the service status failure that initiated the Root Cause Analysis, and displays the run time for this service failure.
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.
The Confidence level displays the accuracy and availability of the information RCA used to perform that analysis. The Exception number indicates the quantity of all target level or test level exceptions encountered during the RCA run. Exceptions are typically due to RCA's inability to evaluate a target or test as a result of the target being unavailable either through Agent Unreachable or being Blacked Out, or as a result of errors trying to collect a metric required to evaluate a test.
The Causes of Failure table contains a list of causes identified by RCA as the source of the outage. You can drill down for more information about a specific cause by clicking the message in the table to display the Alert Details page. If the alert has been identified as a cause of service faults, information about the list of services that were impacted by this alert are listed in the Services Impacted by Failure table. You can click the messages in this table to see the Alert Details page for each service fault. Click the details icon (eyeglasses) in Services Impacted by Failure table to see Alert Details for the failed service, including the Causes of Failure table.
You can use the Previous Updates link to view updated information about past outages in the form of an analysis summary. You can drill down for more information about specific analyses performed at previous points in time. The Previous Updates page summarizes the number of updates available, the time of the most recent update, and the current status of the service analysis.
The Analysis Summary section displays the step-by-step analysis that RCA performed for the current RCA run. You can expand or collapse the list of steps. If the steps include the analysis of a subservice, then an icon appears in the Details column. The details associated with the analysis of that subservice do not appear in the aggregate service's RCA details but can be viewed by clicking on this icon.
Related Topics
About Root Cause Analysis Processing
Getting the Most From Root Cause Analysis
Enterprise Manager Information Roadmap
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