What is change-aware root cause analysis?

Change-aware root cause analysis is a method that treats recent change as the first hypothesis for an outage and tests it against the topology. Deployments, infrastructure-as-code applies, configuration edits, feature flags and cloud-provider events are collected into a single change timeline, then linked through service dependencies to the first symptom, so the analysis can state which change is implicated, with the diff and its approval record. Because the majority of production incidents follow a change, this narrows the search faster than anomaly detection alone. The output is a statement of what changed, held distinct from who approved it, so the record informs the fix rather than assigning blame.