Website outage logic tree
This logic tree helps an on-call engineer narrow a website outage without jumping straight to a single suspected cause. It separates reachability from application health. DNS failure, load-balancer failure, and an unhealthy application require different evidence and different owners. Once the basic checks pass, traffic spikes and upstream dependencies become plausible causes. The leaves are deliberately phrased as checks rather than diagnoses, because incident work should follow current evidence. Adapt the labels to the actual architecture and link each leaf to a runbook. A logic tree is useful when several causes can produce the same symptom. It gives readers a concise reference they can reuse when discussing the result with colleagues.
Open it in the AI editor with a prompt pre-filled — keep what works, change what doesn't.
Scenario
Incident triage
Key decisions
- Reachability: Establish whether users can resolve and reach the service.
- Health: Separate infrastructure reachability from application health.
- Evidence: Use monitoring and logs at each leaf.
When to reuse this
Use as a first-pass on-call troubleshooting guide for a web service.
Frequently asked questions
Why check DNS first?
Are branches always exclusive?
What belongs at a leaf?
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