Enterprise IT Troubleshooting: Cross Functional IT Problem Solving

All major corporations or enterprises worldwide need a large amount of personnel to support their computer systems. One of the most stressful moments for these support personnel is when a system is not working, and thousands of employees and customers cannot do their jobs. Unfortunately, this occurs all too often. If such outages are not addressed quickly, large amounts of revenue and/or productivity could be lost, clients could be lost, and reputational damage could occur. Sometimes the issue is straightforward, but often, it is not. The complexity of modern-day Enterprise IT shops has grown substantially over the past few decades and the trend seems destined to continue.

The inspiration for this book is trying to address the above challenge by looking at Enterprise IT problems in a new way by crossing technology disciplinary boundaries and providing troubleshooting best practices. The goal is to instruct as to how to isolate complex problems and arrive at quicker resolutions. This book is quite technical but not concentrated on deep diving into any technology discipline. Instead, this book focuses on the tools and techniques across all the most useful disciplines in a crisis. This book is born out of its authors’ decades of experience in tackling complex Enterprise IT problems.

This book includes dozens of real-life complex Enterprise IT problems and how they were resolved. This book was also designed to support a college course developed and taught by the authors. In support of this course, the authors created a set of tools that are collectively called “Clouducate”. Clouducate includes Amazon Web Service Command Line Interface scripts (AWL/CLI), and .NET code to create an environment (basically a small datacenter – AWS Virtual Private Cloud) whereby the skills taught in this book could be exercised. There are also custom assignments that break these applications such that the student can work at resolving the problem in a simulation of what happens in real Enterprise IT shops. These tools are freely available for download and explained in the final chapter.