root-cause-analysis

SKILL.md

Root Cause Analysis

Table of Contents

Overview

When to Use

Quick Start

Reference Guides

Best Practices

Overview

Root cause analysis (RCA) identifies underlying reasons for failures, enabling permanent solutions rather than temporary fixes.

When to Use

Production incidents

Customer-impacting issues

Repeated problems

Unexpected failures

Performance degradation

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

Example: Website Down

Symptom: Website returned 503 Service Unavailable

Why 1: Why was website down?
  Answer: Database connection pool exhausted

Why 2: Why was connection pool exhausted?
  Answer: Queries taking too long, connections not released

Why 3: Why were queries slow?
  Answer: Missing index on frequently queried column

Why 4: Why was index missing?
  Answer: Performance testing didn't use production-like data volume

Why 5: Why wasn't production-like data used?
  Answer: Load testing environment doesn't mirror production

Root Cause: Load testing environment under-provisioned

Solution: Update load testing environment with production-like data

Prevention: Establish environment parity requirements

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide
Contents

The 5 Whys Technique
The 5 Whys Technique

Systematic RCA Process
Systematic RCA Process

RCA Report Template
RCA Report Template

Root Cause Analysis Techniques
Root Cause Analysis Techniques

Follow-Up & Prevention
Follow-Up & Prevention

Best Practices

✅ DO

Follow established patterns and conventions

Write clean, maintainable code

Add appropriate documentation

Test thoroughly before deploying

❌ DON'T

Skip testing or validation

Ignore error handling

Hard-code configuration values

1d:[