Troubleshooting problems is the bane of any network or UC team, as they typically struggle with a number of unknowns in their environment while trying to achieve resolution and user satisfaction in a very short amount of time. At some point manually troubleshooting your network will become a giant, time-consuming risk.
Optimizing Your Troubleshooting Methodology
Problems can be identified and resolved faster when the appropriate criteria are evaluated:
- Collecting the right type of information
- Within the right timeframe
- With the right correlation
- With analysis that speeds understanding of the situation
In almost all cases, timeframe is critical: If you knew what your network was doing at the time of the event, problems could be solved in minutes, rather than hours or days. When employing a troubleshooting methodology, most of your time is spent collecting and analyzing information, so optimizing the collection of the information is the key to speeding understanding of the situation.
The Standard Troubleshooting Formula
Having a systematic approach to solving the problem will make you a faster and smarter troubleshooter, and in every network nightmare scenario, the faster, the better.
The troubleshooting formula at face value is a simple one:
- Define
- Isolate
- Solve
Once you have checked the basics like making sure it isn’t a physical-layer problem (is it plugged in?), and that the involved devices respond to ping requests, the real troubleshooting starts. Most troubleshooting involves a rule-in and rule-out process to help narrow down the location and cause of the problem.
Network Troubleshooting Steps:
- Collect information
- Develop a hypothesis
- Test the hypothesis
- Implement a fix
- Verify the problem was solved
- Notify the users
- Document the fix
This may sound simple for a simple network, nevertheless, while vastly more complicated, the formula remains the same in a complex IT environment.
Faster Troubleshooting is Better Troubleshooting
All engineers engage in troubleshooting but getting to the root cause of a problem is key. This is a different activity than just monitoring a network and requires different information to achieve its goal. Organizations that rely solely on monitoring software end up having problems when it comes to troubleshooting issues in their environment.
Troubleshooting a network can be a manual process, or it can be automated. There are network troubleshooting automation tools that help you swiftly identify the root cause and its location essentially completing the first two (most time-consuming) steps so that you can begin working on the solution.
What are the Benefits of Automating Network Troubleshooting?
Network Troubleshooting automation can offer numerous benefits, addressing the challenges faced by network monitoring professionals:
- Speed and Efficiency: Automated tools expedite the identification and resolution of issues, significantly reducing downtime and enhancing network performance.
- Accuracy and Consistency: Automation minimizes human error, ensuring consistent monitoring and reporting.
- Resource Optimization: By automating troubleshooting, IT resources can be reallocated to strategic tasks rather than repetitive troubleshooting.
If you want to become a faster, more efficient troubleshooter, check out our white paper on identifying and resolving the root cause of network problems.
Proactive Network Troubleshooting
Wouldn’t it be great if you could anticipate and prevent problems before they occur? When it comes to network errors, proactive management is the only practical strategy, as opposed to reactive troubleshooting. But how can engineers achieve this?
If you knew what your equipment knew, you could solve problems before users complain. Your network monitoring and troubleshooting solution should include:
- Automatic collection of all the information available on your network’s condition
- Automatic correlation the information to determine where along a path the problem occurred
- Automatically analyze the configuration, performance, and error counters and provide plain-English answers
The benefits of proactive network monitoring are significant and include:
- Early detection and resolution of issues: Proactive troubleshooting, allows you to identify and resolve issues before they cause disruptions or downtime.
- Improved network performance: Proactive troubleshooting allows you to identify and address performance issues before they impact users.
- Enhanced network security: Proactive troubleshooting can help you identify and address security vulnerabilities before they are exploited by attackers.
- Reduced downtime: By identifying and resolving issues proactively, you can minimize downtime and keep your network up and running.
- Cost savings: Proactive troubleshooting can help you identify and address issues before they become major problems.
- Troubleshooting can be done by Tier-1 helpdesk:
- Not all problems need to be escalated to the senior-level network engineer.
- More problems can be solved with first-call resolution, creating happier users, and happier engineers who have less tickets to deal with.
Proactive network troubleshooting is a vital part of any comprehensive network monitoring strategy. It helps organizations maintain a stable and secure network infrastructure while minimizing disruptions and downtime.
The Key to Root-Cause Network Troubleshooting: Total Network Visibility®
PathSolutions TotalView optimizes the root-cause troubleshooting process and addresses the drawbacks of traditional monitoring solutions:
- It’s easily deployable on any network within minutes.
- It collects SNMP error counters, configuration, and performance information on every link, switch, and router in the entire infrastructure every five minutes. The information is collected with a high-degree of packet optimization, so links don’t get flooded and device CPUs aren’t affected.
- It provides timeframe analysis to do evaluations of what happened when events occurred and correlates the information to identify the links, switches, and routers involved between any two endpoints.
- It has a heuristics engine that analyzes the error counters to produce plain-English answers of the problems.
