Anatomy of an RCA

Every completed root cause analysis (RCA) answers the same eight questions.

Section	What it contains
Root cause	The confirmed cause with linked evidence.
Confidence	Evidence-derived, with reasons.
Blast radius	Services and dependencies affected.
Use cases	Business flows impacted.
Transactions	Deterministically counted.
Customers	Unique affected customers, counted not guessed.
Time window	Start, detection and recovery.
Recovery	Verified against live signals.

How an RCA is completed

1. Provenant gathers evidence with read-only tools and ranks competing hypotheses on it.
2. It drafts the RCA, labelling each statement as a fact, observation, hypothesis or recommendation (see Evidence labels).
3. An engineer reviews, corrects and confirms it.
4. The confirmed RCA and its resolution become part of institutional memory.

Customer counts are calculated outside the model; exact customer identifiers never reach it.