Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide

A sample Root Cause Analysis

Now that we have all of the information we need, let's create a root cause analysis report. This report can be in any format, really, but I've found that something along the following lines works well.

Problem summary

At approximately 1:50 A.M. on July 5, 2015 the server blog.example.com unexpectedly rebooted. The watchdog process initiated the reboot process due to a high load average on the server.

After investigation, the high load average appears to be caused by a custom e-mail application, which was left in a running state even though it has been migrated to another server.

From the data available, it seems the application consumed 100 percent of the root filesystem.

While I was unable to obtain process states from ...