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Cloud Computing & DevOps vocabulary · Reliability and Incidents

Root cause

Meaning in cloud computing & devops, with examples

/ˈruːt ˌkɔːz/nounCore term

In cloud computing & devops, root cause means: The deepest, original reason a problem happened, which, if fixed, stops the same problem from coming back, as opposed to its visible symptoms.

In Turkish: kök neden, asıl neden

How it is used

Teams 'find', 'identify' or 'get to' the root cause. The process is root cause analysis (RCA), and a common method is the 'five whys'. Many postmortems now list several contributing factors instead of one single root cause.

Example sentences

  1. Restarting the service fixed the symptom, but we still don't know the root cause.

  2. The root cause was a retry loop that sent ten times more traffic to the database during the outage.

Common collocations

  • find the root cause
  • root cause analysis
  • identify the root cause
  • contributing factor
  • postmortemA written review after an incident that explains what happened, the impact, the timeline, the root cause and the actions that will stop it happening again.
  • incidentAn unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.
  • outageA period when a service, system or part of it is not working or cannot be reached by users.
  • runbookA written step-by-step guide for handling a specific task or alert, such as restarting a service or clearing a full disk, so anyone on call can follow it.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Reliability and Incidents

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