What type of analysis is needed to determine the cause of an outage in the middle-tier web stack?

Root-cause analysis is essential for identifying the underlying factors that led to an outage in the middle-tier web stack. This type of analysis focuses on understanding the primary reasons behind a failure, allowing IT professionals to address the root issues rather than merely treating the symptoms. It typically involves gathering data about the incident, including logs, user reports, and system behavior before and during the outage.

By conducting root-cause analysis, teams can pinpoint specific configurations, application errors, or infrastructure failures that contributed to the disruption. This process not only aids in restoring services but also helps prevent future occurrences by implementing corrective actions based on identified causes.

In contrast, other types of analyses focus on different aspects. For instance, impact analysis evaluates the effect of an outage on users or operations, performance analysis concentrates on how system resources are being utilized, and network analysis inspects the flow of data across the network. While these are important in the context of an outage, they do not directly address the need to uncover the fundamental issues responsible for the failure.