New feature included in all website monitoring subscriptions: Root Cause Analysis
17
Oct 2009

Today we release the Root Cause Analysis feature for all our website monitoring customers, at no additional cost, in all subscriptions.

What is Root Cause Analysis?

Until now, any issues found by WatchMouse were logged in your account and you were alerted according to your settings and preferences. Although the information in the alert tells you what the problem is, a more detailed analysis, or Root Cause Analysis, can be helpful in determining the actual cause of the issue.

How does it work?

When an issue is found and has been confirmed by another monitoring station (if needed), the Root Cause Analysis is triggered. Currently the Root Cause Analysis entails:

  • Perform a traceroute from two monitoring stations to find the actual routes that were used in the tests.
  • A screen dump (image) of the web page in question (for http(s) rules only) in two sizes
  • The source HTML of the web page (for http(s) rules only) if available.
  • Relevant checks: results from previous and subsequent checks for the same rule.
  • A detailed analysis of your domain name set-up
  • DNS analysis from two monitoring stations to see if the host names are resolved properly.
In your logs you will find this icon Route Cause Analysis right next to the (confirmed) error pointing to the Root Cause Analysis report. Note that this icon will be present only for the first confirmed error in a straight sequence of errors. There is another icon that might appear indicating that the log file has additional information (e.g. for http(s), scripting, or dns/domain rules) that looks like this Detailed analysis.

Getting started

If you had any errors reported recently there may already be Root Cause Analysis reports available in your account. To check it out go to the logs and select 'Root Cause Analyses' from the 'Display' menu and click [show].
If there are entries in the resulting list, simply click on the Root Cause Analysis icon to inspect the details.

When an alert email is sent, this will now contain a direct link to the Root Cause Analysis report.