The “How to avoid in the future” section of a Root Cause Analysis report – any use?

You had a major network outage (like Time Warner just did). Panic, stress, sweat, people trying all kinds of crazy things. In the end, the issue is resolved and the outage is behind us. Then, comes the really fun part: doing a Root Cause Analysis (RCA).

There are a ton of templates for this, such as this one. In each one, at the very end, is a section that details “how to we make sure this doesn’t happen again”. Sadly, though, in most cases, this section describes how processes will be changed, checklists will be made and extra peer reviews will be conducted. Frankly, our experience shows this rarely actually works.

Our goal is to change the way this is done. If someone were to spend the time to read every RCA ever written about a network outage and build a system that implements the recommendations detailed in that last section of the document, then issues would indeed be avoided.

We, Indeni, are that someone. Of course reading RCAs manually is a bit difficult so we’ve devised more automatic ways of collecting this knowledge. With Indeni, users have less RCAs to write. One of our larger customers actually told us we’ve reduced the number of RCAs they have per quarter by 93%!

So, if you’ve recently run into an annoying issue with Cisco switches, Check Point firewalls, F5 load balancers, or anything else we support – give us a try. It only takes 45 minutes.