Application domains Root cause analysis is used in many application domains. Manufacturing and industrial process control The example above illustrates how RCA can be used in manufacturing. RCA is also routinely used in industrial process control, e.g. to control the production of chemicals (quality control). RCA is also used for failure analysis in engineering and maintenance. IT and telecommunications Root cause analysis is frequently used in IT and telecommunications to detect the root causes of serious problems. For example, in the ITIL service management framework, the goal of incident management is to resume a faulty IT service as soon as possible (reactive management), whereas problem management deals with solving recurring problems for good by addressing their root causes (proactive management). Another example is the computer security incident management process, where root-cause analysis is often used to investigate security breaches. RCA is also used in conjunction with business activity monitoring and complex event processing to analyze faults in business processes. Its use in the IT industry cannot always be compared to its use in safety critical industries, since in normality the use of RCA in IT industry is not supported by pre-existing fault trees or other design specs. Instead a mixture of debugging, event based detection and monitoring systems (where the services are individually modelled) is normally supporting the analysis. Training and supporting tools like simulation or different in-depth runbooks for all expected scenarios do not exist, instead they are created after the fact based on issues seen as 'worthy'. As a result the analysis is often limited to those things that have monitoring/observation interfaces and not the actual planned/seen function with focus on verification of inputs and outputs. Hence, the saying "there is no root cause" has become common in the IT industry. Health and safety In the domains of health and safety, RCA is routinely used in medicine (diagnosis) and epidemiology (e.g., to identify the source of an infectious disease), where causal inference methods often require both clinical and statistical expertise to make sense of the complexities of the processes. RCA is used in environmental science (e.g., to analyze environmental disasters), accident analysis (aviation and rail industry), and occupational safety and health. In the manufacture of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, food, and dietary supplements, root cause analysis is a regulatory requirement. Systems analysis RCA is also used in change management, risk management, and systems analysis. General principles Despite the different