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Optimizing Root Cause Analysis to Reduce MTTR

Ariel Gordon

Efficiently detecting and resolving problems is essential, of course, to continue supporting - and minimizing impact on - business services, as well as minimizing any financial impacts.

The goal is to turn the tables on IT problems so that 80 percent of the time is spent on the root cause analysis versus 20 percent on the actual problem fixing.

In resolving the issue, communication is a critical factor for integrating different expert groups towards a common goal. Because each team holds a narrow view of its own domain and expertise, there is always the danger lurking that the "big picture" angle will be missing. You don't want lack of communication to result in blame games and finger pointing.

Some problem detection methods include:

- Infrastructure Monitoring: specific resource utilization like disk, memory, CPU are effective for identifying availability failures – sometimes even heading those off before they happen.

- Domain or Application Tools: These help, but leave the issue that overall problem detection is still a game of hide-and-seek, a manually-intensive effort that comes under the pressure of needing a fix as quickly as possible.

- Dependency mapping tools, which map business services and applications to infrastructure components, can help you generate a topology map that will improve your root cause analysis process for the following reasons:

1. Connect Symptoms to Problems: A single map that relates a business service (user point of view) to its configuration items, will help you detect problems faster.

2. Common Ground: The map ties in all elements so that different groups can focus on a cross-domain effort.

3. High-Level, Cross-Domain View: Teams can view problems not only in the context of their domain, but in a wider view of all network components. For example, a database administrator analyzing a slow database performance problem can examine the topology map to see the effect of networking components on the database.

Root cause is a complex issue, so that no single tool or approach will provide you with full coverage. The idea is to plan a portfolio of tools that together deliver the most impact for your organization.

For instance, if you do not have a central event management console, then consider implementing a topology-based event management solution. If most of your applications involve online transactions, try to look for a transaction management product that covers the technology stack that is common in your environment. Put differently, select a combination of tools that are right for your environment.

Once you assess the tools that provide the most value, implement them in ascending order of value so that you get the biggest impact first.

Ariel Gordon is VP Products and Co-Founder of Neebula.

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Optimizing Root Cause Analysis to Reduce MTTR

Ariel Gordon

Efficiently detecting and resolving problems is essential, of course, to continue supporting - and minimizing impact on - business services, as well as minimizing any financial impacts.

The goal is to turn the tables on IT problems so that 80 percent of the time is spent on the root cause analysis versus 20 percent on the actual problem fixing.

In resolving the issue, communication is a critical factor for integrating different expert groups towards a common goal. Because each team holds a narrow view of its own domain and expertise, there is always the danger lurking that the "big picture" angle will be missing. You don't want lack of communication to result in blame games and finger pointing.

Some problem detection methods include:

- Infrastructure Monitoring: specific resource utilization like disk, memory, CPU are effective for identifying availability failures – sometimes even heading those off before they happen.

- Domain or Application Tools: These help, but leave the issue that overall problem detection is still a game of hide-and-seek, a manually-intensive effort that comes under the pressure of needing a fix as quickly as possible.

- Dependency mapping tools, which map business services and applications to infrastructure components, can help you generate a topology map that will improve your root cause analysis process for the following reasons:

1. Connect Symptoms to Problems: A single map that relates a business service (user point of view) to its configuration items, will help you detect problems faster.

2. Common Ground: The map ties in all elements so that different groups can focus on a cross-domain effort.

3. High-Level, Cross-Domain View: Teams can view problems not only in the context of their domain, but in a wider view of all network components. For example, a database administrator analyzing a slow database performance problem can examine the topology map to see the effect of networking components on the database.

Root cause is a complex issue, so that no single tool or approach will provide you with full coverage. The idea is to plan a portfolio of tools that together deliver the most impact for your organization.

For instance, if you do not have a central event management console, then consider implementing a topology-based event management solution. If most of your applications involve online transactions, try to look for a transaction management product that covers the technology stack that is common in your environment. Put differently, select a combination of tools that are right for your environment.

Once you assess the tools that provide the most value, implement them in ascending order of value so that you get the biggest impact first.

Ariel Gordon is VP Products and Co-Founder of Neebula.

The Latest

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...