Root Cause Analysis Tickets (RCA) tickets

Author: Riya Ray

Date: May 13, 2025

Audience: Everyone

Environmental details: Jama Connect Self-hosted instances

Summary

What is an RCA?

A Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a detailed investigation that occurs after the initial issue has been resolved or a temporary solution has been implemented. We create a new and separate ticket for the RCA to identify the underlying problem and prevent it from occurring again.

Why/ When would you need an RCA?

There are four (4) scenarios where Jama Software Support may perform an RCA:

• Support has resolved a Production Outage (a severity 1) customer issue, and the customer requested an RCA to determine the underlying cause.
• Support has resolved a customer issue, but they believe they need to investigate further to mitigate future issues.
• Support believes they have gathered enough new information to attempt to replicate an unreproducible defect.
• Jama Product or Engineering often requests that Support perform an RCA. 

 RCA Prerequisites:

• Ticket Requirement: A Production Outage (severity 1) ticket must be submitted at the time of the outage, and the customer must request a Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
• Information Availability: Can we proceed with the RCA? Support cannot perform an RCA if information is missing.
  • Is there a clear and thorough description of the issue?
  • Are the necessary logs and/or screenshots available?
  • For performance issues, does Support have thread dumps taken during the problem's occurrence?
• Timeline: When did the issue happen? The customer must provide a brief timeline of events. If you are unsure, we will not have the information needed.
• Customer Engagement: Is the customer actively involved in the process? It is essential that the customer is committed to helping Support. The customer must be willing to provide information as requested to diagnose the issue.

Customer Requested RCA

A customer may request a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) only for a Production Outage classified as severity 1 (SEV1). While only SEV1 issues are eligible for an RCA, requesting one is not automatic.

Expectations: Determining a definitive root cause is not always possible, and an RCA ticket may take several months to resolve. Customers must be willing to collaborate and provide information as Support requests.

The original SEV1 issue will be closed, and a new ticket will be created specifically for the RCA process.

Communication regarding the RCA will be limited and may occur only once a month through the new RCA ticket.

• If the user stops responding to requests for additional information, Support will notify the user and share any findings available up to that point before closing the ticket.

The RCA Process

The process for conducting a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) differs from traditional support requests and does not follow standard service-level agreements regarding response times. In all cases, an RCA ticket is considered a lower priority than other tickets, meaning it is less urgent than a ticket related to a current customer issue, as the problem under investigation occurred in the past.
Support will prioritize the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) whenever possible, which includes the following steps:

1. Investigating what happened.
2. Filing a bug report if applicable.
3. Advising the user on steps they can take to prevent similar issues in the future.

Additional Information/Metadata

• Root Cause Analysis
• Troubleshooting

References

• Success Programs
• Success Catalog
• Datasheets
• Request a Solution Offering or Training from the Success Catalog

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