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3.8Making RCAs Actionable: From Analysis to Prevention
The measure of a good RCA is not the quality of the analysis. It is whether the same type of incident stops happening.
The Prevention Hierarchy
- Eliminate: Remove the possibility of the failure entirely (best but often impossible)
- Automate detection: Catch the issue before it reaches production (CI checks, automated scans)
- Limit blast radius: If the failure occurs, limit its impact (circuit breakers, feature flags, canary deployments)
- Speed recovery: Make it easy to detect and recover from the failure quickly (monitoring, runbooks, automated rollback)
- Document: At minimum, document the failure so future teams can recognize it (worst option, but better than nothing)
Always aim for the highest level possible. If you can only document it, your RCA has not gone far enough.