IT Troubleshooting 101

General purpose IT troubleshooting is a dying art. Of course, you can go online and find all kinds of videos and blogs on how to troubleshoot specific issues. Or with a few clicks fire up robust tools like AI search engines (such as Perplexity) or AI assistants with broad capabilities (such as ChatGPT), which are capable of generating human-like text, answering questions, and performing various language-based tasks. 

When it comes to general purpose troubleshooting, however, the offerings are pretty slim. Let’s take a look.

Troubleshooting is one of the most basic skills in IT, and you can make a compelling case that it’s one of the most essential skills in life. Things go wrong; things fail or break; plans go astray. When that happens, you generally have two options, sometimes three — you fix the thing that went wrong; replace it (circumstances permitting); or you adapt and learn how to do without it. All three options entail some level of troubleshooting.

You can’t fix something or make an informed decision about whether it’s more cost-effective to repair or replace it until you understand what broke. You generally can’t make an informed decision about whether you can do without something if you don’t understand how it works and what it does.

Troubleshooting Steps for IT Teams

The consensus is there are typically five or six steps to effective troubleshooting, but they are often interrelated and there is often not a clear demarcation between one step and the next. Here’s the general steps that can be applied to most any IT (or life) problem:

Step 1: Understand the problem. You can’t fix something if you don’t understand what is broken or failing. Generally, the problem is going to be reported or identified by someone either directly affected by the problem or reporting the problem on someone else’s behalf.

This is often, but not always, where you’re going to start on the second step.

Step 2: Gathering information. Typically, there are three questions that will serve as the foundation of your information-gathering process:

• What broke? What is happening that isn’t supposed to, or what is not happening that is supposed to?
• Did it ever work? Or is this what we call in IT, a first-time failure?
• What changed? If it has worked before, can you identify what is different?

Where practical, you can try to recreate the problem, to literally step through the sequence of events and hopefully gain additional insights.

Step 3: Analyze the information: Once you’ve gathered information and/or recreated the problem, you start analyzing and figuring out what actually happened that is causing the problem.

The answer may be obvious, or it may be subtle, but the goal is to come up with a solution or solutions to try to solve the problem, which is to start implementing as your next step.

Step 4: Implementing or testing the solution: This is arguably where most of the work gets done, or at least the part of the work that whoever is affected is going to see. While you are testing your solution, there is one rule that you should almost never break, especially in IT — only change one thing at a time while troubleshooting. The reasoning is simple: if you change multiple things at a time and the problem is resolved, you may not be able to identify what actually fixed the problem.

Step 5: Document the process: After the problem is fixed, the last step, and the one most vulnerable to not being done right or at all, is to document what you did:

• What was the problem?
• What were the symptoms, or how did the problem manifest?
• Who was affected, and how?
• What information did you need to identify the root cause of the problem?
• How did you fix it?
• How did you verify that the problem was fixed? 

These are all questions you want to be able to answer, because if the problem recurs, or a similar problem occurs and you have this information at hand, you are several steps ahead of the game, and don’t have to waste time tracking down information someone else has already gathered. There’s also an audit trail, which is especially important in many professional settings or in regulated industries. But this is the area where many troubleshooters, especially in IT, fail. Afterall, the problem is solved, the user is happy, and it’s natural to want to move on to the next problem.  Make the time to leave a trail for the next IT troubleshooter. It’s a small investment today that will pay dividends to the organization (and to your team’s peace of mind) down the road.

Automation Helps Minimize Human Errors Around File Transfers

One area that IT teams may have to troubleshoot around is file transfers. The hundreds of files exchanged each day can run into issues if a user-friendly, robust Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution is not in place.

Read More: Optimized UI and Built-in Security Can Boost MFT Usage; Minimize Risk

File transfer automation lets IT teams better manage recurring or high-volume file transfers, while reducing or eliminating manual data processing, a process ripe for trouble and the need to troubleshoot. The vital encryption and decryption of sensitive files can also be automated to further reduce risk of human error and increase efficiency.

Organizations that continue to use tedious file transfer processes or manually transfer their large files and bulk batches may find themselves asking for IT help more frequently. Automating this process, with advanced workflows and an intuitive interface can simplify and streamline these tasks to help reduce human error, save IT time, and cut costs.

Automatic file transfer software, like GoAnywhere MFT allows users to effortlessly configure when and how files should move between internal systems, other users, or trading partners.