Tagline: “It wasn’t a glitch. It was a legacy monster… hiding in plain sight.”
🎬 Scene 1: Monday Mourning ☁️💀
It was a Monday. The kind that starts with extra-strong coffee ☕ and silent tears. The Incident that hit on Friday still echoed through the empty Slack channels. No app access. No emails. Even the internal site went poof.
Janet (ITSM Analyst):
“How did this even happen? One upgrade. ONE. And we took down the whole East Coast.”
Mike (Director of Ops):
“RCA. We need one. By EOD. No excuses.” 😬
The war room was reopened. But this time, not for firefighting — it was for postmortem. The Root Cause Analysis.
⚙️ Scene 2: The Tools of Truth 🛠️🔍
Janet spun her chair like a true crime detective and opened the sacred vault — ServiceNow’s Problem Module.
She whispered to herself:
“Logs. Timelines. User reports. Let’s start the autopsy.”
🕵️ Evidence Board
- 🔧 Patch update at 10:01 PM
- 🔥 CPU spike at 10:03 PM
- 💣 Database hung by 10:07 PM
- 🧑💻 Users screaming in Reddit threads by 10:10 PM
One thread led to another. Then another. Until finally… 💡
“A legacy script written in 2014?” Janet gasped.
No documentation. No owner. Just 400 lines of spaghetti code still running in prod.
🧟 Scene 3: Legacy Strikes Back
Cliff (Old Dev Retired in 2020):
“Oh yeah… I remember writing that. It was quick fix for an old DB bug. Didn’t know it was still running.” 🧓💻
Janet:
“Well, Cliff… it just broke the internet.” 🤦♀️
🪦 Scene 4: RCA Report — The Funeral Document
Janet typed like a crime novelist on deadline. The RCA Report had to be:
- 🔹 Clear
- 🔹 Honest
- 🔹 Blameless (HR watching 👀)
- 🔹 Actionable
RCA Summary
- Incident Trigger: Unvalidated legacy script triggered during patch
- Root Cause: Lack of ownership + No documentation
- Impact: 4 hours of downtime, 1M+ users affected
- Fix: Script removed, codebase audited
- Prevention: CMDB updates, legacy ownership reassigned
Mike:
“Good job. Now let’s bury this thing properly.” 🪦
🎭 Scene 5: Reflection in the Breakroom
Janet to herself, sipping cold coffee:
“IT isn’t just about fixing issues. It’s about learning from the ghosts of past deployments.” 👻💻
🎯 Moral of the Story
RCA isn’t about blaming — it’s about understanding the root, trimming the weeds, and making sure it never happens again. Like CSI for servers. 🕵️♂️💼
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