The current process for Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is inherently flawed because it focuses on symptoms rather than causes, lacking a critical causal inference engine. This inefficiency forces engineers to spend countless hours manually searching through metrics, logs, and traces to connect the dots, which significantly delays resolution times and keeps Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) unnecessarily high.
While today’s observability tools flood engineers with alerts, they fail to pinpoint the actual source of incidents. The prevalent use of correlation-based methods frequently misidentifies symptoms as genuine causes. This lack of accuracy erodes user confidence and adds significant complexity to the entire incident resolution workflow.
Announced today at New Relic Advance, Intelligent Root Cause Analysis (iRCA), now in preview, addresses this by cutting through the noise. It utilizes a topology graph, advanced causal models, and a path-based ranking algorithm to quickly identify the probable root cause in seconds instead of hours.
Pinpointing Root Causes with Precision
Unlike correlation-heavy approaches, New Relic iRCA overlays observed symptoms onto a real-time topology graph and applies causal models and a ranking algorithm. This ensures it distinguishes probable root causes from cascading effects which reduces false positives and noise.
And with automated remediation hooks, iRCA turns observability from reactive firefighting into proactive, autonomous operations.
- Predict and prevent issues: Leverages graph-based causal reasoning and probabilistic models to pinpoint root causes, drastically reducing MTTR.
- Decode system complexity: Builds real-time topology graphs for full RCA coverage across complex, multi-cloud environments.
- Link observability to business impact: High-accuracy RCA drives reduced churn, better customer experiences, and improved engineering productivity.`
Beyond Traditional RCA
iRCA drives immediate business impact:
| Capability | Impact |
| Faster Resolution | Automatically pinpoint probable root cause quickly and accurately, often in seconds, thereby drastically reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). |
| Proactive Resilience | Predict and prevent issues with automated remediation hooks, turning observability from reactive firefighting into proactive, autonomous operations. |
| Complete Visibility | Automatically understand all your growing systems and data. iRCA creates a real-time topology graph across complex, multi-cloud, and heterogeneous environments to ensure complete RCA coverage. |
| Business Alignment | High-accuracy and fast RCA translates directly into positive business outcomes, such as reduced customer churn, enhanced customer experience, and increased productivity for engineering teams. |
The Bottom Line: Transforming Incident Response
Business Benefit | iRCA Capability |
Significant Reduction in Operational Costs | Faster Resolution and Proactive Resilience dramatically reduce the time spent by high-cost engineering and operations teams on manual investigation and incident response. |
Improved System Reliability and Customer Experience | Anticipating and resolving failures before they fully manifest and reducing downtime lead directly to higher service availability and better customer satisfaction. |
Increased Team Productivity and Focus | Replacing manual log dives and tool switching and eliminating analysis on false positives frees up valuable engineering time, allowing teams to focus on innovation and feature development rather than firefighting. |
Next steps
New RelicIntelligent RCA is here and you can sign up for the preview today.
- Not a customer yet? Get Started: Sign Up for New Relic. Your account includes 100 GB/month of free data, forever.
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub (discuss.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites.
