| name | rca |
| compatibility | ["github-copilot-cli","copilot-chat","copilot-coding-agent"] |
| description | Root cause analysis for incidents, failures, and unexpected behavior. USE FOR: post-incident RCA, workflow/build failure analysis, 5-why investigation, tracing production outages to contributing factors, generating prevention recommendations. DO NOT USE FOR: live incident command and containment, general performance tuning, feature implementation. |
| invocation_rules | ["Use when the user prefixes input with 'rca:' or asks to investigate why something failed.","Use for structured post-incident analysis after the system is stabilized."] |
| visibility | internal |
| category | operations |
| metadata | {"category":"operations","maturity":"stable","audience":["developer","sre"]} |
| allowed-tools | [] |
RCA Skill
Structured root cause analysis workflow for incidents, pipeline failures, and unexpected behavior.
Workflow
- Symptom triage — clarify blast radius, customer impact, and observable symptoms.
- Timeline reconstruction — map events leading up to the failure and identify inflection points.
- Theory generation — propose at least three plausible root-cause hypotheses, ranked by likelihood.
- Evidence gathering — list what confirms or refutes each theory; call out missing evidence.
- Root cause determination — converge on the most likely cause with supporting evidence.
- Fix proposals — suggest immediate mitigations and longer-term preventive fixes.
- Learnings capture — identify updates for runbooks, guardrails, automation, and follow-up issues.
Output Format
## Incident Summary
## Timeline
## Root Cause Theories
## Determined Root Cause
## Proposed Fixes
## Learnings & Action Items
Agent Pairing
rca (basecoat-10-core-rca)
build-failure-triage
ci-cd-diagnostics