Symptoms
Symptoms indicate potential issues in your system that may be caused by underlying root causes. By identifying symptoms early, you can proactively investigate and address problems before they escalate.
Symptoms are observable indicators that become active when an anomaly is detected in your system. Each symptom is associated with an underlying metric or attribute being monitored, a threshold value at which it's triggered, and a description of what it indicates.
Symptoms can be:
- Local: Observable in the entity where the root cause occurs
- Propagated: Observable in related entities due to root cause propagation
Symptoms are used by Causely's causal reasoning engine to infer root causes. When multiple symptoms are present, Causely analyzes their relationships and patterns to identify the most likely root cause. This enables you to understand not just what is happening, but why it's happening, allowing you to address the underlying issue rather than just the symptoms.
Symptoms describe what you observe (for example, high latency, errors, timeouts); root causes describe why it happens (for example, congestion, lock contention, queue saturation). They can sound similar, but they're different: latency is the effect, congestion is the cause, and fixing the cause is what prevents the symptom from returning.