On Misleading Inputs During RCA

RCA based on incomplete or misleading inputs can drastically increase your MTTR. That’s why providing the evidence for your claims is crucial to help resolve the problem.

– Generic statements like „all” or „every service” may lead to incorrect problem isolation, sometimes pointing to a wrong component.

– Misleading inputs, like „we’re getting timeouts”, without checking whether you actually sent the request leads to even more confusion and time wasted on checking the wrong component. It takes a lot of time to validate a message that never got in, and it’s way easier to do it from the requestor side.

– Time is sometimes an important factor. Just because something worked today, doesn’t mean it will work in 2 weeks. Just because your test or the application version stayed the same, doesn’t guarantee the state of the data.

What’s your strategy to validate the inputs before you jump into resolution?