RCA and Production Debugging Workflow
Learn a structured way to find root cause during incidents: timeline, blast radius, signals, hypotheses, and verified fixes, then a useful postmortem.
What You'll Learn
Understanding Why Incidents Need a Process
The 3 AM guessing spiral It is 3 AM. Checkout on acme-shop is failing and the pager is screaming.
Following the Five-Step RCA Process
Why a fixed order beats instinct A fixed process does one job: it removes the decision about what to do next.
Establishing the Timeline of Changes
Ask what changed first Systems do not invent new failure modes on their own.
Measuring the Blast Radius
Counting what is broken Blast radius is how much of your system is affected: one pod, one service, a dependency chain, a whole cluster.
Reading Metrics, Logs, and Traces Together
What each signal answers Each signal answers a different question, and the cause usually sits where they agree.
Forming and Testing Hypotheses
Ranking hypotheses with one test each After step 3 you should be holding two or three possible causes.
Skills You'll Master
Curriculum Index12 topics
Understanding Why Incidents Need a Process
The 3 AM guessing spiral It is 3 AM. Checkout on acme-shop is failing and the pager is screaming.
Following the Five-Step RCA Process
Why a fixed order beats instinct A fixed process does one job: it removes the decision about what to do next.
Establishing the Timeline of Changes
Ask what changed first Systems do not invent new failure modes on their own.
Measuring the Blast Radius
Counting what is broken Blast radius is how much of your system is affected: one pod, one service, a dependency chain...
Reading Metrics, Logs, and Traces Together
What each signal answers Each signal answers a different question, and the cause usually sits where they agree.
Forming and Testing Hypotheses
Ranking hypotheses with one test each After step 3 you should be holding two or three possible causes.
Fixing and Verifying Recovery in the Metrics
Apply the smallest reversible fix Choose the fix that is easiest to undo and changes the least.
Building an RCA Assistant Script
What the script collects The assistant automates step 3.
Writing a Short Postmortem
What a useful postmortem contains A postmortem is not a diary of what happened.
Hands-On Lab: Debug a Partial Failure on aiops-lab
Before you start You need the aiops-lab kind cluster running with the acme-shop services, the Prometheus port-forward...
Quick Reference and Common Mistakes
The workflow and its commands Common mistakes Starting with a fix instead of a diagnosis is the classic one.
What You Built and What Comes Next
What you built You can now investigate an incident in a fixed order, tell a symptom from a cause, and prove recovery in...
Career Impact
Roles that use the skills in this module.
- High Demand
SRE
₹20L - ₹38L a year
- High Demand
AIOps Engineer
₹18L - ₹35L a year
- High Demand
DevOps Engineer
₹15L - ₹30L a year
Next Modules
Related Guides
Practice on the Coding Sheet
Not a software engineer sheet. Every problem comes from real DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud interviews, from your first script to a system you build yourself.
Open the Coding SheetFrequently Asked Questions
The trigger is what set the failure off, such as a release that changed a pool size. The root cause is the gap that let that change cause an outage, such as no test or alert covering pool size. You fix the trigger during the incident and the root cause afterwards.
No. Kubernetes stores only the current ConfigMap. Rollout history records the pod template of a Deployment, so keep config in Git, add a config hash annotation to the pod template, or set the value as an environment variable in the Deployment.
Logs only show what a service chose to write. A service can go quiet while still failing, or fail on requests that never reach it. The error ratio you were paged on is the only honest proof of recovery.
It can rank hypotheses from the evidence you give it, quickly. It cannot confirm them. Treat its answer as a hypothesis, and run the one check that would prove it wrong.