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Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in Obsy uses AI to correlate alert signals, recent deployments, service dependencies, and telemetry patterns to produce a structured explanation of what caused an incident.

What the AI analyzes

  • Alert signals — severity, affected services, golden signal type (errors, latency, saturation, traffic)
  • Deployment changes — recent Kubernetes events and CI/CD deploys in the affected service’s cluster (via Change Intelligence)
  • Service dependencies — services in the same environment that could be upstream/downstream causes
  • Telemetry patterns — error rate spikes, latency increases, memory saturation from your OTel data

RCA output

Each RCA report contains:
SectionWhat it tells you
SummaryOne paragraph: what happened, what was affected
Root causeThe most likely technical cause
Contributing factorsSecondary issues that made things worse or harder to detect
ImpactWho was affected and how severely
RecommendationsSpecific actions to fix the root cause and prevent recurrence
Impact scoreA 0–1 score reflecting severity and duration

Triggering an RCA

Automatically from an alert

When a critical alert arrives via webhook, Obsy starts an RCA automatically. You’ll see it linked in the alert detail within seconds.

From an incident

Open the incident detail and click Run RCA in the header. The analysis runs against the incident’s linked alerts, affected services, and timeline.

Manually

Go to RCA in the sidebar and click New RCA. Select an alert or incident to analyze.

Viewing RCA results

Go to RCA in the sidebar to see all analyses. Click any entry to open the full report. The report is also linked from:
  • The alert that triggered it
  • The incident it’s associated with
  • The postmortem (if one was created)

RCA and postmortems

Once an RCA is complete, click Create postmortem from RCA to pre-fill a postmortem with the root cause, contributing factors, impact, and recommendations. See Postmortems for more.