Root Cause Analysis is the means to identify the ultimate source and cause of an outage.  When an outage occurs that causes serious downtime of a website, typically organizations are in crisis mode.  Urgency of resolution sometimes pushes aside due process, change management and general caution.  Root Cause Analysis attempts to as much as possible isolate logfiles, configurations, and the current state of systems for later analysis.

With traditional physical servers, physical hardware failure, operator error, or a security breach can cause outages.  Since you’re dealing with one physical machine, resolving that issue necessarily means moving around the things that broke.  So caution and later analysis must be balanced with the immediate problem resolution.

Another silver lining in cloud hosted solutions is around root cause analysis.  If a server was breached for example, that server can immediately be shutdown, while maintaining it’s current state as a disk or EBS snapshot.  A new server can then be fired up from a AMI image, then your server rebuilt from scripts or template and you’re back up and running.  Save the snapshot then for later analysis.

This could be used for analysis of operator error related outages as well.  Hardware failures are more expected and common in cloud hosted environments, so this should and really must push adoption of best practices around infrastructure, that is having scripts at hand that rebuild everything from bare metal.

More discussion of root cause analysis by Sean Hull on Quora.

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