Root Cause Analysis Methodology

Root Cause Analysis Methodology is a skill for Claude Code from evangelosmeklis/thufir. It costs 67 tokens per session (2,196 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for root-cause analysis, the process of finding the underlying reason for a production error, outage, or other incident. It organizes evidence such as alerts, logs, user reports, timelines, and recent changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate alerts, outages, unexpected behavior, and service degradation, then build a timeline and identify actionable causes.
Why use it?
It helps separate symptoms from causes and prevents teams from stopping at the first visible failure.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the thufir plugin — 4 skills, 4 commands, 3 MCP servers shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate alerts, outages, unexpected behavior, and service degradation, then build a timeline and identify actionable causes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/evangelosmeklis/thufir/root-cause-analysis
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add evangelosmeklis/thufir --skill root-cause-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/evangelosmeklis/thufir

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install thufir, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 4 commands, 3 MCP servers.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Root Cause Analysis Methodology

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/evangelosmeklis/thufir/root-cause-analysis.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/evangelosmeklis/thufir/root-cause-analysis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/evangelosmeklis/thufir/root-cause-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/evangelosmeklis/thufir/root-cause-analysis.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,196 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00067 $0.02196
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01098
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00439
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00220

Measured 8d ago against content hash e850557fab94, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Root Cause Analysis Methodology scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/root-cause-analysis/SKILL.md · 304 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 304 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Root Cause Analysis Methodology

Overview

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a systematic investigation process to identify the underlying cause of production incidents, errors, and outages. This skill provides structured methodologies for conducting effective RCA that goes beyond surface-level symptoms to find actionable root causes.

When to Use This Skill

Apply this skill when:

  • Production alerts fire indicating system degradation
  • Users report errors or unexpected behavior
  • Incidents occur requiring post-mortem investigation
  • Metrics show anomalous patterns
  • Any situation requiring systematic debugging of production issues

Core RCA Principles

1. Timeline Reconstruction

Establish a clear timeline of events:

  • Identify when the issue first appeared (error logs, metrics, user reports)
  • Note when alerts fired or detection occurred
  • Map recent changes (deployments, configuration changes, infrastructure changes)
  • Identify when the issue resolved (if applicable)

Create a visual timeline connecting:

  • WHEN: Timestamps of key events
  • WHAT: What changed or broke at each point
  • WHERE: Which systems, services, or components were affected

2. Symptom vs. Root Cause

Distinguish between symptoms and root causes:

Symptoms are observable effects:

  • "API returning 500 errors"
  • "Database queries timing out"
  • "Memory usage at 95%"

Root causes are underlying reasons:

  • "Connection pool exhausted due to size reduction in deployment"
  • "Missing database index causing full table scans"
  • "Memory leak introduced in commit abc123"

Always trace from symptoms to root causes by asking "why?" repeatedly.

3. The Five Whys Technique

Ask "why?" five times to drill down from symptom to root cause:

Example:

  1. Why are users seeing errors? → API is returning 500s
  2. Why is API returning 500s? → Database queries are timing out
  3. Why are queries timing out? → Connection pool is exhausted
  4. Why is connection pool exhausted? → Pool size was reduced from 100 to 10
  5. Why was pool size reduced? → Deployment of commit abc123 changed configuration

Read the full file on GitHub · 304 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 304 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A e850557fab94

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Root Cause Analysis Methodology is a skill published in the GitHub repository evangelosmeklis/thufir (7 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 2,196 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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