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RCA TRAINING
Root Cause Analysis training by Sologic provides the tools, skills, and knowledge necessary to solve complex problems in any sector, within any discipline, and of any scale. Learn MoreSOFTWARE
Sologic’s Causelink has the right root cause analysis software product for you and your organization. Single users may choose to install the software locally or utilize the cloud. Our flagship Enterprise-scale software is delivered On Premise or as SaaS in the cloud. Learn More
On 3/5/2012 between 9:00AM and 23:00PM we received a number of customer complaints regarding the inability to place orders at our website. Our customer service infrastructure worked well – we received the comments in a timely manner, but fixing the problem required six total hours. Estimated lost sales during that time is $1,500,000, based on an average of $250,000/hr. We also experienced an erosion of customer trust, which negatively impacts our customer service goals.Customer access was being blocked by a “500” error. This occurs when the application server times out while processing requests. The app server timed out because, at a time of high web traffic (we were promoting an annual discount on a popular product), the SQL server stopped processing queries. This happened after the transaction log was unable to grow to accommodate additional inbound information.
The log file size is fixed, but information continued to flow in until there was no additional space. Normally the log files are periodically truncated manually by the DBA. However, the primary DBA was out of the office and the backup DBA did not realize he was supposed to manually truncate the log files. We discovered that we have no formal process in place to manage task definition and hand-off when a DBA is out of the office.
DISCLAIMER:
The purpose of this example RCA is to provide a learning aid to Sologic students and others interested in root cause analysis. Information contained in Sologic published examples is from publicly available sources, such as newspaper and magazine articles, published governmental reports, academic papers, or occasionally from first-hand knowledge of the event.