Understanding Traversal's Responses

Traversal’s output is designed to be transparent, explainable, and audit-friendly, so engineers can understand why Traversal reached its conclusions.

This page explains the common elements you’ll see across our main features.

Root Cause Analysis

Traversal root causes your incidents.

Each root cause analysis includes:

  • Summary statement

  • Confidence level (High / Medium / Low)

  • Evidence citations

  • Relevant anomalies

  • Timeline context

  • Impact estimation


Confidence Levels

Every root cause analysis or alert assessment includes a confidence rating:

Confidence
Meaning

High

Strong correlation patterns, consistent evidence across multiple signals.

Medium

Theory is plausible and likely but missing full visibility or traces.

Low

Weak or partial signals. Requires human confirmation.

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Explanations for each confidence level can also be found directly in the web app by hovering over each confidence level label.

How To Use This

Traversal’s confidence rating reflects data completeness, not certainty.

Lower confidence often means missing information (e.g. missing logs or traces) or ambiguous symptoms. Always keep in mind that incomplete data leads to lower confidence, and humans remain in the loop for high-impact decisions.


Evidence Citations

Traversal always shows its work.

Evidence can include:

  • Metrics anomalies

  • Log lines

  • Error rate spikes

  • Deployment events

  • Code diffs (read-only)

  • Upstream/downstream failures

  • Topology relationships

  • Pull requests

Each citation is clickable, allowing engineers to validate or challenge the AI’s interpretation.


Timelines

Timelines show the sequence of:

  • When symptoms began

  • When anomalies were detected

  • When deployments occurred

  • When related alerts fired

  • When dependent services began failing

This helps you understand what happened first and how failures cascaded.


Traversal may offer:

  • Diagnostic suggestions

  • Remediation steps

  • Runbook-style guidance

  • Suggested team escalations

These are recommendations, not actions. Traversal will not make changes to your system without permission.

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