Troubleshooting is one of our strengths passions

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Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes

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It has been said that if a developer produces the absolute best code that he can, he is by definition not smart enough to debug it. Sometimes developers can be too close to the project to see the problem as they resolve to treat the symptoms.

More often than not, a systematic approach of collecting key empirical data is the first step to uncovering the root cause of a problem. Treating symptoms only works for simple problems or to provide temporary relief. Discovery of root cause requires a disciplined approach.

Empirical data is absolutely necessary. The starting place to discovery is to find existing empirical data and to start a collection of data points that provides clues as to where to look next. The existing data, that is the data that exists before collecting has commenced, could reside in logs from the application, windows event logs, dump files, etc.

Using PERFMON on the server that is exhibiting the problem and on the database server that hosts the database is a good place to start. While watching PERFMON in real time is usually beneficial, it is important to collect data in a file as well. Many times something that seems intermittent actually has a pattern or coincidence. These patterns sometimes emerge from collected data while they are more elusive in real time.

Suspicious patterns may emerge from the collected data. It may be necessary to collect different metrics depending on the initial symptom and subsequent discoveries. For example, if CPU sustains an undesirably high percentage and SQL Server, (or Oracle Server) is not the culprit, you may need to look at the currently running processes and start tracking metrics on the guilty process.

Troubleshooting is one of our ~~strengths~~ passions.

Let us help you restore your systems to peak performance.