Narrow the troubleshooting Scope

Narrowing down the scope of the problem to get twice the result with half the effort. The law of problem occurrence and the specific environment often imply the cause of the problem.

 

The following are some checklists that can help narrow the troubleshooting scope. view these problems before the troubleshooting, maybe there will be additional discoveries.

1.	Have you installed the latest patch?
2.	Check support.microsoft.com. Have you encountered any known problems? Is there any hotfix available to solve the problem?
3.	Is the problem occasional or can it always be reproduced?
4.	The problem only occurs on several machines or in all environments?
5.	Is there any simplified problem that can be reproduced?ProgramFor us to test?
6.	Is the screen-shot captured when the problem occurs?
7.	What are the specific steps to reproduce the problem? What's special?
8.	After a problem occurs, what methods can be solved or mitigated temporarily?
9.	Is anti-virus software installed? Is there a firewall?
10.	What is the software architecture? How does the data flow in the entire software environment?
11.	Is troubleshooting performed in the production environment or in the testing environment?
12.	Is the database used? What database is used?
13.	Is the problem related to load?
14.	Used for development? All managedCode? Does VB, C ++, or COM + be used?
15.	What is the network environment? Does NAT (Network Address Translation) work?
16.	Is it a cluster environment? Is Server Load balancer used?
17.	Is it a domain environment?
18.	If it is not a domain environment, have you tried to create the same account with the same password on the server and client for testing?
19.	What system patches have been installed recently? Have you tried to uninstall the patch before testing?
20.	Apart from the problem itself, is there any system exception? For example, CPU and memory usage, and network usage?
21.	Is the program load within the normal range?
22.	Is there any exception in system logs?
23.	Have you tried to change the account of the Program for testing? For example, create another administrator account to log on to the system for testing.
24.	Does the program have a UI? Do you want to double-click to start or use task management to start regularly?

 

Note: This table is good. If possible, I will summarize some additional information in the future.

From: <efficient troubleshooting for Windows user-mode Programs>