Root Cause Report
The Root Cause Report is the master RCA artifact: incident identity and severity, impact, full timeline, the causal chain stated as trigger → propagation → failure, contributing factors held distinct from the root cause, an evidence index linking every claim to telemetry or a change record, corrective actions with named owners, and an explicit confidence statement.
Who it's for: Director of Problem Management, SRE and platform leads, problem-review boards.
What does the Root Cause Report contain?
The evidence index is what makes it audit-grade rather than AI-generated prose. It is the artifact we lead every replay with.
Root Cause Report, questions.
What should a root cause analysis report include?
Incident identity and severity; an impact statement; a full timeline; the causal chain stated as trigger, propagation and failure; contributing factors held separate from the root cause; an evidence index that links every claim to the telemetry or change record supporting it; corrective actions with named owners and dates; and an explicit statement of confidence.
What is the difference between a root cause and a contributing factor?
The root cause is the condition that, had it not occurred, would have prevented the failure. A contributing factor made the incident worse or more likely, wider blast radius, slower detection, longer recovery, but did not on its own cause it. A good RCA keeps them in separate sections.
How is this different from a postmortem?
A postmortem is an internal engineering ritual; a Root Cause Report is a document that a regulator, a customer and a problem-review board will all accept, with an evidence trail. Onepane produces the report; you can still run your postmortem from it.
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