Root Cause Analysis: AI-generated explanations for why your metrics changed

Overview

Investigating anomalies or trends in your data is extremely manual. Teams spend hours each week running the same repetitive process — picking properties, running breakdowns, eyeballing segments — to figure out what drove a change in a metric.

Mixpanel’s Root Cause Analysis (RCA) does that work for you. Launch RCA from any Insights report or fired alert and an AI agent automatically diagnoses what changed: it validates the anomaly, runs the relevant breakdowns, ranks the dimensions that contributed most, and writes up an interpretation with a confidence level and suggested next steps — all delivered as a Board you and your team can keep working from.

How it works

When you run an RCA, Mixpanel:

1. Validates the anomaly. The agent first confirms there really is a meaningful change to explain.
2. Selects properties to analyze. RCA combines properties you’ve prioritized for your project with properties Mixpanel suggests based on the event being analyzed.
3. Runs breakdown queries. The agent runs the breakdowns it needs to find which dimensions actually moved.
4. Streams cards into a Board. As each step finishes, a new card appears on the RCA Board — you’ll see a live progress banner at the top while the agent is still working.
5. Writes an interpretation. When the analysis is complete, the Board includes contribution factor analysis, ranked dimensions, an AI-written interpretation of what likely caused the change, a confidence level, and AI-suggested next steps.
6. Asks for feedback. Every generated Board includes a thumbs-up / thumbs-down feedback widget so you can tell us when RCA got it right (or didn’t). Feedback drives quality improvements.

Where to launch RCA

The RCA Board

Because RCA generates a standard Mixpanel Board, it inherits all the capabilities of our typical Boards:

• Anyone in your project can open it. RCA Boards are project-shared by default, so teammates can pick up the analysis where you left off.
• You can edit it like any Board. Add cards, rearrange, annotate, or duplicate it if you want a private working copy.
• Cards include contribution factor analysis. Each ranked dimension lands as its own card with the breakdown, contribution percentage, and supporting context.
• The interpretation card summarizes findings. The AI’s written explanation, confidence level, and suggested next steps live at the top of the Board so anyone scanning the results gets the punchline first.

Settings: prioritize properties

Oftentimes, customers know which properties matter for their business and want to direct the root cause analysis to focus there first.

In project settings, you can specify which event properties RCA should prioritize during analysis. For example, a marketing team that knows anomalies usually trace back to utm_campaign_id can point RCA at that dimension so it’s always considered first. Properties you prioritize are combined with Mixpanel’s automatic suggestions, so you never lose the agent’s broader view — you just bias it toward the dimensions you care most about.

Feedback

Every generated Board has a thumbs-up / thumbs-down feedback widget. We use this signal to evaluate RCA quality and improve future runs. If RCA missed the mark, please rate it — it’s the most direct way to influence what we work on next.

Limits

• Daily RCA runs per project are capped by plan: Enterprise 300/day, Growth 70/day, Free 10/day.
• RCA today reasons over events and properties. Adjacent context like annotations, session replays, experiments, and metric trees aren’t included in the V0 agent’s reasoning.

Related

• Alerts — set up alerts that can launch RCA when they fire
• Boards — the surface RCA generates results into