For continuous improvement, it is essential to prevent any error happening again. If you can identify problems correctly, then an efficient solution can be developed and applied. It's important to get to the root cause of the problem to fix the problem. Five whys is a simple, yet most effective, technique to identify the root cause of a problem.

In the five whys technique, you gather the team for a retrospective look at an event and ask five consecutive questions to identify actual issues. Take an example where data is not showing up in your application monitoring dashboard. You will ask five whys to get to the root cause.

Problem: Application dashboard not showing any data.

1. Why: Because the application is unable to connect with the database.
2. Why: Because the application is getting a database connectivity error.
3. Why: Because the network firewall is not configured to the database port.
4. Why: Because the configuring port is a manual check and infrastructure team missed that.
5. Why: Because the team don't have the skills and tools for automation.

Root Cause: Manual configuration error during infrastructure creation.

Solution: Implement a tool for automated infrastructure creation.

In the preceding example, a first-instance issue looks like it is related to the application. After the five whys analysis, it turns out to be a bigger problem and there is a need to introduce automation to prevent similar incidents. RCA helps the team to document lessons learned and continuously build upon it for operational excellence. Make sure to update and maintain your runbook-like code and share best practices across the team.