> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.obsy.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Root Cause Analysis

> AI-powered analysis that tells you what broke and why.

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:

| Section                  | What it tells you                                             |
| ------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Summary**              | One paragraph: what happened, what was affected               |
| **Root cause**           | The most likely technical cause                               |
| **Contributing factors** | Secondary issues that made things worse or harder to detect   |
| **Impact**               | Who was affected and how severely                             |
| **Recommendations**      | Specific actions to fix the root cause and prevent recurrence |
| **Impact score**         | A 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](/postmortems/overview) for more.