A supporting apparatus includes a configuration-information storage unit having stored therein dependencies among devices in association with a list of the devices. When information about a device where a failure has occurred is input, a dependency among devices including the faulty device is obtained from the configuration-information storage unit. Based on the obtained dependency among devices including the faulty device and information about the faulty device, learning data with the dependency and a cause of failure being associated with each other is created. Then, based on the created learning data, a solution procedure indicative of a procedure for specifying the cause of failure is generated by using, for example, algorithm ID3.