Root-Cause Analysis

GermainUX Root-Cause Analysis: Investigating User Experience and Technology Impact

🔎 Overview

GermainUX Root-Cause Analysis helps teams move from what happened to why it happened, using the user, business workflow, application, and technology data collected and correlated by GermainUX.

Root-Cause Analysis can be used to investigate issues affecting:

The objective is to connect a KPI or issue with the evidence available in GermainUX and identify the most likely contributing factors or root cause.

🔬 Analysis Dashboard

The Analysis Dashboard is GermainUX's primary interface for root-cause investigation.

It brings the investigation—from a business or technical symptom to supporting evidence—into a single analytical workflow.

From an Aggregate, Pivot, or Drill-through Dashboard, users can drill into the Analysis Dashboard to investigate a selected KPI or data point.

The Analysis Dashboard helps answer:

1. Is this abnormal?
   Compare the selected KPI with its baseline, historical behavior, trends, and available statistical information.

2. What changed with it?
   Identify related KPIs that changed during the same period.

3. What is most strongly related?
   Analyze configured KPI relationships to identify signals that may help explain the selected KPI's behavior.

4. Who or what is most affected?
   Break down the issue by available dimensions such as users, sessions, applications, pages, workflows, products, systems, versions, or other monitored attributes.

5. Is it isolated or widespread?
   Determine whether the issue affects an individual instance, session, user, population, or the broader monitored environment.

6. What happened in an individual instance?
   Drill into the underlying event, error, transaction, request, session, or other raw data.

7. What contributed to it?
   Examine available traces, relationships, duration breakdowns, errors, requests, services, queries, code execution, infrastructure conditions, or Session Replay evidence.

The exact analysis and evidence available depend on the KPI, monitored technology, deployed GermainUX components, and data being collected.

The new dashboard is available with GermainUX 2026.2 or later.

🔗 Correlation & Relationships

GermainUX correlates monitored data to help identify relationships between user activity, workflows, applications, and technologies.

Correlation can use:

For example, a slow user interaction may be correlated with the browser request, backend transaction, service call, database query, or other monitored activity associated with that interaction.

KPI Relationships provide additional analytical context by defining relationships between KPIs. The Analysis Dashboard can evaluate these relationships to identify signals that may help explain changes in the KPI being investigated.

Learn more about Correlation and relationships which can provide evidence for root-cause investigation; a relationship or correlation does not necessarily prove causation.

👤 User & Session Evidence

When User Monitoring is deployed, GermainUX can connect an issue to the user experience in which it occurred.

Depending on the deployed monitoring capabilities, investigators can examine:

Session Replay can be used to see what the user was doing and experiencing before, during, and after an issue.

This provides additional context when investigating errors, failed transactions, workflow friction, slow interactions, conversion issues, or customer feedback.

Learn more about Session Replay.

🔄 Business Workflow Analysis

For configured business processes, GermainUX can analyze the workflow in which an issue occurred.

Depending on the configured process and available data, teams can investigate:

This helps determine whether a productivity, adoption, or conversion issue is associated with a particular workflow step or underlying application or technology condition.

Learn more about Process Mining.

💻 Technology Root-Cause Analysis

GermainUX can correlate technology performance with user and business impact.

Depending on the monitored technology and deployed components, investigation evidence can include:

For supported technologies, this allows teams to trace an issue across multiple application layers rather than investigating each layer independently.

📊 Analyze Impact at Scale

Root-cause investigation is not limited to an occurrence.

GermainUX can use data to determine how broadly an issue is occurring and which populations are most affected.

For example:

Issue → Related Factors → Affected Population → Individual Instances → Supporting Evidence

This helps teams distinguish an isolated occurrence from an issue affecting many users, sessions, workflows, transactions, or systems.

Scheduled AI summaries for bulk user sessions are available to provide a consistent assessment of the top 10 issues.

🤖 AI-Assisted Analysis

Where AI capabilities are enabled, GermainUX can assist the investigation by analyzing available monitored data and providing additional insights and recommendations.

AI can help users explore an issue, understand available evidence, identify relevant patterns, and obtain recommendations for resolving or improving the condition being investigated.

AI-generated analysis should be considered together with the underlying evidence available in GermainUX.

🎯 From Detection to Resolution

Root-Cause Analysis is part of the broader GermainUX operational workflow:

Observe → Analyze → Prioritize → Act → Validate

For example:

KPI degradation detected
→ Analyze abnormal behavior
→ Identify related KPIs
→ Determine affected users or population
→ Inspect individual instances
→ Trace related activity
→ Review Session Replay or technical evidence
→ Identify likely root cause
→ Take corrective action
→ Validate that the KPI and affected experience have recovered

Depending on the configured GermainUX Automation capabilities, findings can also be connected to alerts, tickets, notifications, scripts, APIs, or other approved automated actions.

🔗 Related Documentation

Root-Cause Analysis capabilities depend on the monitored technology and deployed GermainUX components.

ℹ️ Get Help

The Germain Team can help you set this up. Contact GermainUX Support.