Can anomaly detection be used for root cause analysis?

Yes, anomaly detection can play a role in root cause analysis (RCA), but it’s not a standalone solution. Anomaly detection identifies unusual patterns or deviations in data, which can signal potential issues in systems. For example, a sudden spike in server response times or a drop in application throughput might trigger an alert. However, pinpointing the exact cause requires further investigation. Anomaly detection acts as a starting point by highlighting where and when something went wrong, allowing teams to focus their RCA efforts on specific components or timeframes. Without this initial signal, teams might waste time searching through unrelated logs or metrics.

Anomaly detection supports RCA by narrowing the scope of investigation. For instance, if a monitoring tool flags abnormal CPU usage in a microservice, developers can immediately check recent code deployments, resource allocation, or dependencies linked to that service. Tools like Prometheus or Elasticsearch can correlate anomalies with logs, traces, or infrastructure metrics to identify patterns. Suppose a database latency anomaly coincides with a surge in failed API calls. In that case, teams might trace the issue to a misconfigured query or a bottleneck in indexing. Temporal correlation—linking anomalies to specific events like software updates or traffic spikes—also helps isolate root causes. However, this requires integrating anomaly detection with observability tools to contextualize alerts.

While useful, anomaly detection has limitations in RCA. False positives or vague alerts (e.g., “high memory usage”) can lead teams down unproductive paths. For example, a memory leak alert might stem from a bug in application code, inefficient garbage collection, or even legitimate workload increases. To address this, combine anomaly detection with detailed logging, distributed tracing, and domain knowledge. In one case, a cloud-based autoscaling system might detect abnormal traffic but miss the root cause—a third-party API outage—unless logs from external services are analyzed. Effective RCA often requires layering anomaly detection with other techniques, such as dependency mapping or A/B testing, to validate hypotheses. In short, anomaly detection accelerates RCA by flagging issues but doesn’t replace deeper diagnostic work.