Finding the root causes of IT anomalies can be challenging, but the rewards are worth it. By identifying the root cause or causes of an incident or critical failure, response teams can resolve incidents faster and determine the best steps to avoid having them recur. This can drive down both the frequency of service interruptions and their duration. However, there is an essential distinction between root cause investigation after an incident and the investigation that occurs while an incident is still active.
Move Beyond Retrospective Root-Cause Analysis
Most people first experience root-cause analysis (RCA) as part of an incident’s post-mortem. With retrospective RCA, teams review a specific high-priority outage to determine how to avoid another similar outage. Because the original incident is resolved, teams have the luxury of time to research not just what happened but dig deeply into why it happened and how to improve processes and systems to mitigate future risk.
However, rapid response and remediation rely on finding the root cause quickly when something like a costly service outage occurs.
Response teams must identify what happened, why it happened, and suggest a course of action within minutes.
How Automated Real-Time Root-Cause Analysis Reduces MTTR
Real-time RCA, identifying incident root causes in minutes or seconds, is essential to reduce incident mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). Changes, system failures, and other root causes are often easy to fix when identified, shortening MTTR and avoiding minutes or hours of costly downtime. Finding root causes quickly makes a real difference.
So, if it’s valuable to understand the root cause of an incident right away, why is it not a common practice? The answer lies in how difficult and resource-intensive it can be. To find the root cause in real-time, response teams must sift through event data from multiple observability tools. With Nebula ITSM, this process is streamlined, integrating data from various sources and using advanced AI models to pinpoint root causes swiftly and accurately.
Nebula ITSM: Revolutionizing RCA (Root Cause Analysis) with AI
At Accrete AI, we’ve found that the first step in accelerating root cause analysis and speeding up MTTR is to organize incident data in a clear, understandable way and present that data to response teams quickly and efficiently. Nebula ITSM uses AI and machine learning to automate this process, providing real-time insights to speed up the process of incident remediation, which reduces the burden on human operators to spend countless hours analyzing hundreds, if not thousands, of ServiceNow tickets to find causal change tickets for an incident.
Our tool captures data from multiple sources, including change management systems like ServiceNow, historical incident data, and topology data. By correlating this information, Nebula ITSM can reveal the causal relationships behind incidents with surprising speed and accuracy. This automated RCA ensures that the underlying algorithms have access to clean, organized data, making AI/ML outputs twice as accurate and reliable.
Real-World Impact: Success Stories
One of our manufacturing customers saw a dramatic decrease in incident MTTR from 22 days to 8 days by using Nebula ITSM’s real-time RCA capabilities. By automating the alert process and identifying the root cause of critical alerts within seconds, they significantly reduced their MTTR, leading to more stable and reliable IT operations.
How to Automate Root Cause with the Power of Generative AI
Despite the hype surrounding generative AI, this emerging technology can provide significant value to teams automating RCA. Generative AI and the underlying large language model (LLM) algorithms can successfully compare an individual incident’s data with a vast database of prior IT incidents used in their training when supplied with relevant data in context.
Nebula ITSM leverages generative AI to automate incident analysis. It summarizes incident impact and identifies the root cause through analysis of hundreds, if not thousands, of ServiceNow change tickets to figure out the causal change tickets related to an incident with higher accuracy than most human responders. This has resulted in much faster triage times, with some organizations slashing triage time in half.
Get Started with AI and Accelerating Root Cause Analysis for Incidents
With AI-suggested root causes proving more accurate than most human responders and significantly reducing MTTR, the future of RCA is firmly rooted in automation and artificial intelligence.
As we move towards this data-rich and fast-paced era of IT operations, the ability to swiftly and accurately pinpoint root causes isn’t just a competitive advantage; it’s a necessity. Discover how Nebula ITSM can transform your root cause automation and elevate your IT operations.
Ready to shape the future of incident analysis and resolution? Contact us today to learn more about Nebula ITSM and how it can revolutionize your IT management.