How to Troubleshoot - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 - 5.1

Summary

In this insightful video, Professor Messer delves into the structured process of troubleshooting within IT organizations, highlighting the significance of structured problem-solving methods. The video underscores the importance of Change Control processes to minimize system downtime and errors, urging viewers to adapt these practices even in personal environments when feasible. Viewers learn essential steps such as problem identification, theorizing potential causes, testing resolutions, and documenting solutions. The video emphasizes thorough planning and effective communication with change management committees for smooth implementation and data integrity.

Highlights

• Troubleshooting in IT involves a structured process to resolve issues quickly. 🛠️
• Change Control reduces downtime and potential errors within organizations. 🔄
• Documenting the troubleshooting process aids in preventing future issues. 📚
• Gathering information involves user interviews and log analysis. 🔍
• Systematic testing of theories helps identify the root cause of problems. ✔️
• Expert involvement can be crucial for complex technical issues. 💡

Key Takeaways

• Understand the value of structured troubleshooting for quick problem resolution. 🛠️
• Change Control processes are essential to avoid unnecessary system downtime. ⏳
• Backups and documentation are key to successful troubleshooting. 📚
• Interviewing users and gathering comprehensive data helps pinpoint problems. 🔍
• Testing theories systematically can lead to efficient problem resolution. ✔️
• Involve experts when necessary to ensure optimal solutions. 🧠

Overview

In this video, Professor Messer takes you on a journey through the nuanced world of troubleshooting in Information Technology. With the structured process that most organizations adopt, viewers learn the importance of detailed documentation, initiating with the Change Control process. This ensures all changes are managed effectively, minimizing potential downtime and maximizing system reliability.

The troubleshooting process demands an understanding of the problem at hand, made possible through extensive data collection and analysis. Key steps include diagnosing symptoms, consulting with users for additional insights, and evaluating possible changes through systematic analysis. Backups and rigorous Change Control processes are emphasized to maintain integrity and allow for smooth adjustments if needed.

Professor Messer wraps up by illustrating the importance of testing hypothesized resolutions and recording the entire process to create a helpful resource for future issues. The documentation aids in preventing recurring problems, allowing peers to access solutions readily. This meticulous method is presented as a best practice for IT professionals aiming for efficient and reliable problem-solving methods.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Importance of Troubleshooting The chapter 'Introduction and Importance of Troubleshooting' highlights the significance of problem-solving in Information Technology. It explains a step-by-step troubleshooting process that most organizations use, emphasizing that these steps are well-documented to provide a logical path for resolving issues efficiently. The chapter also introduces the concept of Change Control as a method to manage any alterations, underscoring the importance of a formal troubleshooting flowchart in handling changes.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Change Control Process The 'Change Control Process' chapter discusses the structured approach organizations use to manage changes within their environment. Unlike at home, where changes can be made without notifying others, organizations implement a formal process to mitigate downtime and errors. The initial step in this process is planning, which involves deciding on the potential changes.
• 02:00 - 04:00: Understanding and Identifying the Problem The chapter titled 'Understanding and Identifying the Problem' discusses the importance of change management in IT systems. It emphasizes the need to assess risks before performing software updates or OS patches on servers. The chapter highlights considering the impact of server unavailability on business operations. It also underscores the necessity of having a recovery plan to revert changes if needed, ensuring business continuity.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Establishing and Testing Theories In the chapter 'Establishing and Testing Theories', the transcript discusses the common practice of maintaining a duplicate server for testing within a lab environment. This allows for updates to be performed and tested safely to ensure normal operation. After understanding the impact of a change and testing it, the results are documented and presented to a Change Control committee. This committee has the authority to approve or disapprove the change and schedule its implementation. Upon their approval and scheduling, the changes can then be made effectively. The process ensures that updates are managed systematically with minimal risk.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Implementing Solutions The control process in network management is more complex than making changes on a home network due to the need to ensure system and application availability. This process helps everyone understand what changes are happening and when. When addressing technical issues with networks or operating systems, following a troubleshooting process is crucial for efficient problem-solving. The chapter will guide the reader through each section of this process.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Documentation and Knowledge Sharing The chapter titled 'Documentation and Knowledge Sharing' emphasizes the significance of understanding a problem from the beginning as the crucial first step in troubleshooting. It highlights that identifying the issue is pivotal in solving it. To effectively identify the problem, gathering comprehensive information and details about the specific issue is necessary. The chapter outlines this as a best practice in troubleshooting, focusing on thorough documentation and knowledge sharing to facilitate resolving issues more efficiently.

How to Troubleshoot - CompTIA A+ 220-1001 - 5.1 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 a big part of Information Technology is solving problems and in this video I'll take you through a stepbystep process for troubleshooting in most organizations troubleshooting a problem involves a series of well-documented steps these steps are designed to give you a logical path to follow that will give you a way to troubleshoot the problem quickly and easily one of the reasons we have this formal troubleshooting flowchart is because of Change Control Change Control is a way we could manage any changes
• 00:30 - 01:00 that might occur in our environment this is very commonly seen in organizations that would like to minimize the amount of downtime and mistakes that might occur when a change takes place when you're in home you can make changes to your operating system or changes to your local network without informing anyone else the change is taking place but outside of your home networks in your organization there's a formal process for making these changes this process starts with the planning process you need to decide what change might occur
• 01:00 - 01:30 for example you might need to plan to perform a software update or an operating system patch on a server before making that change you need to determine what the risk is for that particular change if you make a change to a server and there's some type of problem will that server become unavailable and if that server is unavailable how does that affect the overall business change management also means that there is a recovery plan so you can Implement a change and if that change does not work you have a way to to revert back to the original
• 01:30 - 02:00 configuration it's common have a duplicate server in a lab that you can then perform the update and then perform tests to make sure that the server is working normally now that you understand the impact of this particular change you performed testing to make sure that it works you can document this information and present your results to the Change Control committee at that point they'll approve or disapprove the change and then decide where on the schedule that particular change will occur and then on that date you're able to make those changes as you can see this Change
• 02:00 - 02:30 Control process is much more involved than making changes by yourself on your home network but it's designed to make sure that all of the systems and all of the applications are always available and that everybody knows what changes might be occurring at what time when you're working on solving some type of technical issue with your network or your operating system you want to follow a troubleshooting process to make sure you're able to solve this problem as quickly and easily as possible we'll step through each section
• 02:30 - 03:00 of this troubleshooting process so that you can understand a best practice for being able to solve these issues the first step in solving a problem is understanding the problem from the beginning this is perhaps one of the most critical phases of the troubleshooting process because if you aren't able to identify the issue you won't be able to solve the problem to be able to identify this problem then we need to gather information we want to gather as many details as possible about this particular issue issue you want to
• 03:00 - 03:30 be able to duplicate this issue and one of the ways that we're going to be able to duplicate it is to know exactly what the problem is to begin with you want to be able to identify all of the symptoms that are occurring when this problem is happening you may find that multiple symptoms are occurring and that might be related to a single problem or there might be multiple problems that you're troubleshooting simultaneously if you're working with a user that's having this problem make sure you ask them as many questions as you can about the issue what type of problem is occurring do you see any
• 03:30 - 04:00 error messages on the screen what happens after the error message is displayed try to gather as much information as possible so that you can understand exactly what the user is seeing from their side this is where Change Control might be able to help you because there's a problem that's occurring today that wasn't occurring yesterday so it might be useful to know if any changes occurred during that time frame if you're identifying multiple problems during this phase it might be useful to separate them into separate pieces that way you're able to evaluate
• 04:00 - 04:30 each one individually the problem might be interrelated between all three or you may find there is a different root cause for each individual problem it's during this problem identification that you may want to perform some backups you will eventually be making changes to this environment so it may be a good idea to have a backup that you can restore to if you run into problems you may also want to check other help desk tickets or other change records in your organization to see if things may have Chang change that the
• 04:30 - 05:00 user may not know about there may be changes to the infrastructure or the underlying Network that no one in that department may know but may be causing a significant problem with this application you'll also want to make sure that you're Gathering as many log files as possible an operating system has extensive log files available and some applications will have their own log files that you can use during the troubleshooting process now that we've gathered information about the problem we need to establish a theory about why the problem is occurring and with most things the
• 05:00 - 05:30 simplest explanation is often the most likely so use aam's razor to be able to make a list of possible reasons that this problem is occurring of course sometimes the explanation for the problem may be relatively complex so you need to think about all possible reasons that might be causing this issue even reasons that may not be completely obvious at first glance make a list of all of the possible causes for this problem start with the most easiest issues to resolve at the top and then the more complex ones near the bottom
• 05:30 - 06:00 this means during the testing process you can start with the least difficult issues to test you may be able to resolve the problem very early on or you may find that the issue is more difficult to resolve so you may end up going further down the list to issues that are more complex to be able to troubleshoot and test and of course you should use external sources to be able to gather more information you can often find details in a thirdparty knowledge base or use your Google skills to see if someone else may have run across one of
• 06:00 - 06:30 these more esoteric issues now that we've made this list of theories we can perform the testing to see if these theories are actually resolving the problem if your first theory is that it's a bad cable you can replace the cable run your test and see if the problem was resolved if that didn't work you can move to the next theory on your list and then the next Theory down at some point you may find that calling an expert in this particular area might help you out whether it's an expert that's internal in your organization or it's an expert
• 06:30 - 07:00 that you can call in from a third party to help resolve this particular issue you'll go through this process of testing a theory evaluating it and then going back to test the theory over and over until you find a resolution and if you do find a resolution then you're now able to begin the process of making a plan to resolve the issue in production the goal of this plan should be to resolve the issue with the minimum amount of impact we don't want to bring the system down for any longer than possible and we want make sure that the
• 07:00 - 07:30 user has access to all of their data this might mean that we have to resolve the problem when the users are not in the building if that's the case we may want to set our hours during nonproduction times to be able to implement this change as we're writing down this plan of action we may want to consider creating a plan b or even a plan C that way if we run into problems with plan a we can still resolve this issue by going to the next plan on our list we've now taken our plan to the Change Control committee they've given
• 07:30 - 08:00 us a time frame that we can use to implement the plan and then we show up in the data center and begin the implementation process if this plan is relatively complex we may need to call in additional resources so don't be afraid to call a third party either internal or external to your organization to come in to be able to help resolve this issue this might be very important especially if you have a very small time frame in order to make this change you want to have as many resources as available and as many people that can help if you run into
• 08:00 - 08:30 problems after performing The implementation you now need to perform testing to make sure that the changes you put in are the ones that actually resolve the problem this might be a test that you're able to do yourself or it may require bringing your users in to perform the test that they can duplicate on their workstations now that the problem's been resolved it would be nice if the problem didn't occur again so you might want to evaluate the issue and see if there are any preventative measures that you can Implement so that this issue does doesn't occur
• 08:30 - 09:00 again if other people run into the same problem it would be nice if they had some documentation they could reference so that they could follow the same path you use to be able to resolve the issue that's why it's so important to document these issues each time a problem is resolved you may have a knowledge base or a database of information in your environment that you can use to make sure that others have access to this valuable data for example what was the error message that people were receiving what action did you take and what was the outcome of the changes that you made
• 09:00 - 09:30 you might be able to put this into a centralized knowledge base there might be a Wiki or some other type of database that you can use to document all of this information let's step through the troubleshooting process one last time we've run into a problem so the first thing we're going to do is gather as much information to identify what the problem actually is this might be error messages information from our users or log files then we can establish a theory of what we think the problem might be and then we can perform some tests to
• 09:30 - 10:00 see if our theory is going to resolve the problem if that theory doesn't fix the problem we can go to the next theory on our list perform the test for that theory until we find one that resolves the issue now that we think we have a fix we can document the process for applying that fix in our production environment our Change Control team will give us a time and the date and we'll be able to implement that plan into production and then verify that the system is indeed working with our fix in place with this fix in place we can then
• 10:00 - 10:30 document everything that we learn during this process if this problem occurs again we'll have a database or knowledgebase of notes that we can use to solve the problem and make sure that everything is working properly