Before covering the best practices of troubleshooting, it is important to understand the different styles of troubleshooting. In my experience, I have found that people tend to use one of three styles of troubleshooting, which are as follows:
The Data Collector
The Educated Guesser
The Adaptor
Each of these styles have their own strengths and weaknesses. Let's have a look at the characteristics of these styles.
I like to call the first style of troubleshooting, the Data Collector. The Data Collector is someone who generally utilizes a systematic approach to solve issues. The systematic troubleshooting approach is generally characterized as follows:
Asking specific questions to parties reporting issues, expecting detailed answers
Running commands to identify system performance for most issues
Running through a predefined set of troubleshooting steps before stepping into action
The strength of this style is that it is effective, no matter what level of engineer or administrator is using it. By going through issues systematically, collecting each data point, and understanding the results before executing any resolution, the Data Collector is able to resolve issues that they might not necessarily be familiar with.
The weakness of this style is that the data collection is not usually the fastest method to resolve issues. Depending on the issue, collecting data can take a long time and some of that data might not be necessary to find the resolution.
I like to call the second style of troubleshooting, the Educated Guesser. The Educated Guesser is someone who generally utilizes an intuitive approach to solve issues. The intuitive approach is generally characterized by the following:
The strength of this style of troubleshooting is that it allows you to come up with resolutions sooner. When confronted with an issue, this type of troubleshooter tends to pull from experience and requires minimal information to find a resolution.
The weakness of this style is that it relies heavily on experience, and thus requires time before being effective. When focusing on resolution, this troubleshooter might also attempt multiple actions to resolve the issue, which can make it seem like the Educated Guesser does not fully understand the issue at hand.
There is a third and often-overlooked style of troubleshooting; this style utilizes both the systematic and intuitive styles. I like to call this style the Adaptor. The Adaptor has a personality which enables it to switch between systematic and intuitive troubleshooting styles. This combined style is often faster than the Data Collector style and is more detail oriented than the Educated Guesser style. This is because they are able to apply the troubleshooting style appropriate for the task at hand.
While it is easy to say that one method is better than the other, the fact of the matter is that picking the appropriate troubleshooting style depends greatly on the person. It is important to understand which troubleshooting style best fits your own personality. By understanding which style fits you better, you can learn and use techniques that fit that style. You can also learn and adopt techniques from other styles to apply troubleshooting steps that you would normally overlook.
This book will show both the Data Collector and Educated Guesser styles of troubleshooting, and periodically highlighting which personality style the steps best fit.