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Analyze Root Cause of Network, Device, and Service Issues

You can use Paragon Automation to identify the root cause of issues related to network, device, or service health. Issues are logged as error events, which are then displayed as alarms in the Paragon Automation GUI. Paragon Automation performs root cause analysis (RCA) and combines these alarms and identifies the original cause of the issue. The original cause is displayed in a smart alarm along with the resulting dependent alarms.

Smart alarms allow you to focus on the core reason for the issue and you don't have to go through multiple alarms to find the root cause. After you identify the root cause, you can remediate the issue as needed. For more information about root cause analysis, see Understand Root Cause Analysis.

Note:

Before you perform RCA, ensure that you have onboarded devices, created device groups, and configured topology acquisition, so that Paragon Automation can acquire the network topology. For more information, see Acquire and View the Network Topology.
To analyze the root cause of network, device, or service issues, you must:
  1. Create one or more rules.
    Rules define how to collect and analyze telemetry data about the network and generate notifications when anomalies occur. You can create rules to monitor network, device, and service health, network resource key performance indicators (KPIs), various system parameters, and so on. For more information, see Configure a Custom Rule in Paragon Automation GUI.
  2. Create and run a playbook instance.
    Playbooks are collections of rules for addressing specific use cases and run on device or network groups. You must include the rules added in Step 1 to playbooks in order to deploy them to network devices. Alarms are generated based on the configured playbooks and rules. For more information, see Create a Playbook Using the Paragon Insights GUI.
  3. Add one or more resources.
    Resources are network elements such as devices, interfaces, protocols, label switched paths (LSPs), IPSec tunnels, and so on. To identify the root cause of a network. device, or service issue, you must map resources across rules. For more information, see Add Resources for Root Cause Analysis.
  4. Configure dependencies between resources.
    Multiple alarms on different resources can be traced back to the original issue, only when dependencies are configured between the resources. When you configure dependencies between resources, Paragon Automation can combine a set of error events on those resources and identify the root cause of the errors. For more information, see Configure Dependency Between Resources.
  5. View smart alarms and the root cause.
    If a network, device, or service issue occurs, alarms are generated based on the playbooks running in the network and on the network devices. When KPIs cross predefined thresholds, causing multiple KPI anomalies, multiple alarms are generated.
    Paragon Automation categorizes all linked alarms into a single group called a smart alarm and identifies the root cause of the sequence of errors. The alarms are displayed in a collapsible tree structure with the root cause of the alarms displayed at the top of the tree. The alarms are listed underneath the root cause in the order that the alarms occurred, thereby displaying the different issues triggered by the root cause. You can view smart alarms on the Alerts page (Monitoring > Alarms and Alerts > Alerts). For more information, see About the Alerts Page.

After you analyze the smart alarms, you can remediate the issue as needed.

Note:

The RCA feature is disabled, by default, in Paragon Automation Release 23.1. For instructions on how to enable the feature, see the Release Notes.

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