Root Cause Analysis (RCA) can provide you with great value by filtering through large amounts of data related to your services and identifying the most significant events affecting your service’s availability. If you are constructing your own services to manage in Enterprise Manager, it is important that the services be defined with some thought and planning in order to get the most out of RCA.
The first item to consider in getting the most from RCA is the set of dependencies of your service on other services or system components. Be sure to identify all of the system components that your service utilizes in order to accomplish its task. If you omit a key component and the service fails, RCA will not be able to identify that component as a possible cause. Conversely, if you include components in the service definition on which the service does not actually depend, RCA may erroneously identify the component as a cause of service failures.
When building service dependencies, keep in mind that you can take advantage of the aggregate service concept that is supported by Enterprise Manager. This allows you to divide your service into smaller subservices, each with its own set of dependencies.
Your services may be easier to manage in the modular fashion, and RCA will consider not only the status of a subservice (a service on which you depend) but also on any of the system components or service on which, in turn, the subservice depends and provides you with the power to encapsulate the services a key component exposes to you in the form of a managed service on which your service may then depend.
The second item to consider in getting the most from RCA is the use of component tests. As you define the system components that your service depends on, consider that there may be aspects of these components that may result in your service failure without the component itself failing. Component tests allow RCA to test the status not only of the target itself, but also the status of its key aspects.
The RCA system allows you to create component tests based on any metric that is available for the key component. Remember, this includes any user-defined metrics that you have created for the component, allowing you great flexibility in how RCA tests the aspects of that component should your service fail.
Related Topics
About Root Cause Analysis Processing
Enterprise Manager Information Roadmap
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