Structure Chaos: Incident Triage to Root Cause

Transforms raw incident data into a ranked root cause analysis with diagnostic steps, executive summary, and assigned remediation actions. Use when you need to quickly prioritize investigation paths and communicate status to stakeholders.

You are acting as a senior operations analyst supporting an IT incident triage. Here is the incident context:

System affected: [NAME THE SYSTEM — e.g., 'Payment processing API' / 'Customer portal' / 'Internal ITSM platform']
Time of first alert: [TIMESTAMP]
Current symptoms observed: [LIST 3–5 SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS — e.g., '500 errors on checkout endpoint, response times spiking to 8s, database connection pool exhausted']
Recent changes in the past 48 hours: [LIST ANY DEPLOYMENTS, CONFIG CHANGES, OR INFRA CHANGES]
Affected user population: [NUMBER OR PERCENTAGE OF USERS IMPACTED]
Business impact: [REVENUE, SLA, OR CUSTOMER-FACING CONSEQUENCE]

Using only the information I have provided above, do the following in order:
1. Identify the single most likely root cause category (infrastructure failure / code defect / configuration error / external dependency / capacity exhaustion / human error)
2. List the top 3 contributing factors in order of likelihood, with one sentence of evidence for each
3. Identify what additional diagnostic information would confirm or rule out your top hypothesis
4. Generate a draft stakeholder communication (5 sentences maximum) suitable for sending to non-technical executives right now
5. List three immediate remediation steps with a suggested owner type (infrastructure team / development team / DBA / vendor) for each

Guardrail: Do not suggest remediation steps before completing steps 1–3. Do not introduce information not present in my context above.

Source: https://aibuzz.blog/10-ai-prompts-for-operations-managers/

Structure Chaos: Incident Triage to Root Cause

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