Probable Root Cause

Probable Root Cause (PRC) is a machine learning process in Moogsoft AIOps that identifies which Alerts responsible for causing a Situation. PRC looks for patterns in user supplied feedback. It does not use 'Root Cause Analysis' techniques.

With Probable Root Cause:

  • You can immediately determine where to begin troubleshooting and diagnosis as soon as you open a Situation by looking at the Probable Root Cause Alerts.

  • You can resolves Situations quickly by examining the The Top 3 Probable Root Cause Alerts appear under Next Steps in a Situation Room.

How does PRC work?

You manually label Alerts as either a Root Cause Alert or a Symptom Alert, the Moogsoft AIOps PRC Model uses this data to predict Situation root causes.

Subsequently, when Moogsoft AIOps generates Situations, it labels an Alert or Alerts as having a Root Cause Estimate. A Root Cause Estimate is always assigned even if the data set is small. Generally, the more data Moogsoft AIOps has the more accurate it is. However, that data needs to be consistent and the model is only as effective as the data it is supplied with. For example, two conflicting labels will confuse the model. If you do not know the status of an Alert do not label it. You do not have to label every Alert.

How does Moogsoft AIOps learn?

Machine Learning uses features like Severity, Host, Description and Class and takes the values of those features for all labelled Alerts and uses a Neural Network to estimate the Root Cause for all the Alerts in a newly created Situation. It does this even if that Situation has not been seen before based on the model and labelled data.

See Configure and Retrain Probable Root Cause for more information on training your model.

PRC Column

This column (Situation, Alerts Tab) shows the Probable Root Cause Estimate as a percentage of the Alerts in that Situation and is useful as a prioritisation aid. For example, the higher the value an Alert has, the higher the probability that the Alert is the root cause of the Situation

As Alerts are added to a Situation, the Root Cause is recalculated (Situation, Alerts list) and therefore the PRC column may change. The more accurate and consistent data you feed your model the more accurate the estimate.