3.3.3. Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis

Fixing a symptom without finding the root cause is like putting a bucket under a leaking roof — it manages the immediate problem but guarantees the ceiling will eventually collapse. A deployment failure that you "fix" by redeploying without understanding why it failed will fail again in the same way. Root cause analysis transforms incident response from a firefighting exercise into a learning opportunity that strengthens your systems.

This section covers systematic troubleshooting using AWS observability tools, leveraging service health information for rapid diagnosis, and conducting root cause analysis on failed deployments, scaling events, and infrastructure issues. When a CodeDeploy deployment fails, do you know whether to check the deployment logs, the instance health, or the appspec configuration first?