How did I improve my troubleshooting skills | My 5 steps framework for effective problem solving

that there is some issue something is wrong with this particular web server so friends whenever you go for an interview an interviewer will always put certain questions which will judge or which will test your analytical ability your troubleshooting skills your problem solving approach and if you have a very very clear framework which i will share with you today you can definitely give a very very good example of your analytical approach or your problem solving approach and this will definitely give a huge weightage to your profile hello friends welcome to itk fun day your own channel where we make it interesting for everyone so in this video we will understand how to troubleshoot pretty much any issue which we face in the world of i.t problem solving and troubleshooting is an art more than a science and we do it day in and day out in our daily lives but more or less we get confused and we take too much time working on an issue and trying to troubleshoot it without having a clear set of framework so what i have done in this video is i have tried putting a framework around my approach towards solving any issue or troubleshooting any problem which i face and i am gonna give it to you in this video so that you can try and experiment and see if this works for you and before we start i would like to clarify some questions which were asked in the comment section that what is this channel all about because i keep on posting videos across various categories across various technologies right from networking cloud project management uh productivity skills etc so this is pretty much my personal initiative to share whatever knowledge i have gained in the world of i.t in a in a language which is interesting and which is understandable to a public to an audience which is non-iit as well and for you i would also suggest that do not restrain yourself to a specific area keep exploring keep learning and i think this will do wonders in your career so now let's start with our video please subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon so the step one is know your basics this is the toughest part guys and there is no easy way around it because in order to troubleshoot any issue in pretty much any area of your i.t world or maybe your personal life you need to have some basic understanding of how that particular thing works suppose your mother comes to you and asks you to see why a particular bulb is not working in your house and suppose if you don't even know how a bulb actually gets electricity and how it is connected to a switch you should have a basic understanding of how the electricity reaches to that particular bulb it is not something which will come overnight i am giving you a layman example but this is the foundation of troubleshooting any issue you need to have a basic understanding of the area the overall all the components and the interfaces how these interfaces are linked to each other how it works and trust me you do not need to be a scientist in that particular area you just need to know how these components talk to each other how these all put together and create a one big picture so the second point is ask questions this is by far the most underrated thing which we do while we get a problem to fix we do not ask enough questions to establish the exact issue instead we rather go and start trying to fix that issue abruptly which is not the right way you should ask all the questions to make sure that you are exactly understanding the business user issue or any customer's pain point so after asking valid question that at the third step you have to try and visualize the problem you have to understand just close your eyes think in your mind how this whole flow is happening how this particular error might be happening once you start visualizing the problems it would become much more easier for you to exactly understand the whole flow and try to understand the failure points which might be occurring and you can also draw a diagram of your own it could be a rough diagram it does not matter but it gives you so much so much confidence that yes you are understanding this whole flow so that's why if you know your basics and if you ask valid questions it enables you to visualize a problem in a better way so now let's understand point four so point four or step four in this framework is break it to replicate it that means that once you understand the whole flow you have to start breaking it into small small pieces and try to understand one particular piece then try to understand another different piece and try to funnel out try to filter out all the possible scenarios which might be there at the beginning but once you start breaking down the problem you can you can narrow down narrow down to a problem specifically in that particular area so break it to replicate it what i mean by replicating it that while you are breaking the problem at the same time one thing which you should always do is to try replicate it yourself so maybe a customer or a user might have told you something but it would be such a nice idea if you could or if you are able to replicate that particular issue in front of you within your environment but that can only happen once you do all the three steps correctly and with all your efforts then only you can you know replicate the issue and fifth and the last step is google knows everything i can understand coming from a technical background sometimes our ego comes in our way and we try to fix all the issues on our own knowledge but trust me guys every issue has been faced by any any any other person in the world somewhere somewhere or the other so you have to always once you have all these four steps done and once you exactly know the problem what is happening google should be your first place to try to understand where could be the root cause of obviously it is great if you know the solution yourself but in case you do not know how to fix an error google is there to help you don't waste time just go to the google and type valid question googling is also an art so friends i hope now you are clear with these five steps and now we will take a real business case and see how we can apply this framework by for fixing a specific issue and in order to memorize this framework i have created a brain tattoo so to memorize this framework k a v b g you can always remember this brain tattoo which is keep adding valuable brave goals this would help you to keep recalling this whenever you are trying to troubleshoot so now let's quickly take a real it issue and apply this framework so friends this is uh the problem which the user has reported user has said that he is getting site cannot be reached while accessing one of your web applications so now let's apply this framework on this issue first is know your basics so as i said you need to understand at the first place how this web application actually works or how any web application actually works you need to have that basic understanding and this would definitely help you get started but that does not mean that if you don't know it you can't start fixing the issue you can still google it around understand how that works but we will not spend much time here because uh this is something which is self-explanatory on step two asking questions now this is where we will spend most of our time trying to get the issue now this could go on and on based on the based on the response we are getting from the user but just for example sake i will give you certain examples of how to ask questions so first valid question which which you could ask is whether he is getting this error all the time or is it intermittent in nature where the user has come and said that no it is not all the time sometime it works sometime it is not working so first question which you asked you know the answer for that is you have an intermittent issue now a second question which you can ask is what kind of error you are getting so he said that site cannot be reached is displaying but is there any other error specific error which he can uh he can share with us so on that customer has said that he is getting error connection refused now another question which you could ask is whether this error is happening on a specific browser like chrome or is it on internet explorer for that he has said that it is on all browsers another valid question which you could ask is is it happening only for him or for all the users in his department and for that also he has said that it is happening for everyone and one last question which you could ask is whether he is accessing this website within the corporate internal network or somewhere outside and for that he has said that he is accessing it internally okay so now we have asked a list of questions and now we know that now if we you know rephrase this whole problem we have much more details from what it was at the beginning so a user is getting intermittent error site cannot be reached with a further detailed error of connection refused on all the browsers this error is also happening for all the other users in his department and it is happening within the network he is accessing it within the company network so now as we have a clear set of answers now we go and we try to visualize this based on our understanding of this whole application so friends in step 3 we try to visualize this problem try to understand how this problem is flowing and then try to go to step 4 to break it into different sections to narrow down it okay so in this particular problem that the url which the user is uh hitting is https myportal.corpin.com home this particular uh url when the user is hitting he is intermittently getting error which is site not found or connection refused and this is happening within the network for all the users so now first thing which you will try to do is try to visualize this whole flow and try to understand how this application interacts with all the different components so the user hits this url this url goes to this particular load balancer and this particular load balancer then routes this particular url request to your three web servers which are which are you know managing this uh load okay so you have maybe apache tomcat for example deployed on all these uh three nodes and then these nodes pass on this request to your back end application uh server main application server and which and then then also has a database layer at the end so if you try to hit the same url at your end because now you have broken it down you know that error could be at you know this level this level this level or this level or maybe this level okay so at any at any level or any place this error could be first step which you could do is to try to break it and eliminate the pieces one by one so first thing which you could do is try to eliminate the application layer from this whole picture and see if you can at least try if you are at least able to reach your web uh web server or web tier uh layer okay so if you remove this particular url until here okay are you able to reach this much first of all so when you try to hit it from your environment you are also getting the same error the exact same error which the user is getting so it proves two things first of all the issue is also replicating at your machine within the network so that is a good point second clue is that you have now removed the application layer so issue lies somewhere from web tier towards the left side okay so now next step which you can take is to further break down this issue how you can do that you know that this particular load balancer uh talks to these different apache tomcat servers or web app servers so you try to see whether the request is able to reach these nodes specifically one by one okay so what you will do you will try to uh hit not the load balancer url but you try to hit the actual web server and see whether you are able to reach that apache tomcat home page or that web server directly if you don't know apache tomcat forget about it but just understand whether you are able to reach your web server or not so maybe you try to hit this url so now you try to hit https ws host 1 colon 8080 this ws host 1 is the host name of your first node of of this particular web server so if this is reachable that means that this particular node is responding the same way you try to hit the second node with w as host 1 that also works but when you go to the third node you are not able to reach that node and you are exactly getting the same error which you are getting when you are hitting the load balancer what does that prove that prove that there is some issue something is wrong with this particular web server so now what you can do is you have completed your step one step to step three and step 4 now you exactly know where this issue is now you can directly go to step 5 and start googling about this particular error like error connection refused on apache tomcat or site cannot be found while accessing apache tomcat web server and maybe the very obvious first search result would be from stack overflow and maybe that suggests that this particular error comes then you have to check whether your apache tomcat service is up and running or not after searching that you go login to your server and you actually see that this particular apache tomcat service is in stopped state so you start that service try to hit the url again see if it is working then further validate it by running the load balancer url and see if you have fixed this issue so this is the framework which we have applied to fix a problem now this particular scenario could vary for you for you it could be a network issue for you it could be a database issue but as far as you are ticking these boxes and applying your own customized approach i am pretty sure that you would be able to troubleshoot any issue with ease and with a proper framework so friends i hope you now know my five-step framework to troubleshoot any issue your approach could be much better than me so please let me know in the comment section so i can learn from you also please hit the like button subscribe button share it with your friends and colleagues when you hit the like button it tells youtube that there is something useful going on on this channel thank you so much keep subscribing keep supporting bye for now and yes keep hustling

Channel: IT k Funde

Views: 108,118

Keywords: how to improve troubleshooting, problem solving skills, problem solving techniques, how to fix anything, troubleshooting, troubleshoot, step by step, 5 steps, analytical reasoning, how to find root cause, troubleshoot network problems, how to fix a network problem, how to troubleshoot network problems, how to troubleshoot network, decision making, problem solver, how to fix apache tomcat, apache tomcat, how to crack interview for freshers, problem solving interview questions

Id: 0Pk08wucjU8

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020