Preventing reoccurrence

Since we feel pretty confident about our hypothesis as to what happened, we now can move on to the final step of our root cause analysis; preventing the issue from reoccurring.

As we discussed in the beginning of our chapter, all useful root cause analysis reports include a plan of action. Sometimes, this plan of action is something to be performed immediately at the time of the issue. Sometimes, this plan is to be performed later as a long-term resolution.

For our issue, we are going to have both, immediate actions and long-term actions.

Immediate action

The first immediate action we need to take is to ensure that the systems primary function is healthy. In this case, the server's primary function is to serve the company's blog.

This is easy enough to check by going to the blog address in a browser. We can see from the preceding screenshot that the blog is working as expected. Just to be sure, we can validate that the Apache service is running as well:

# systemctl...