Monday March 03, 2008

When did it happen ? and When in the Lifecycle ?
I recently visited a customer in Northern California to facilitate a Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting session with a colleague of mine, Peter Brentnall from the Solaris RPE group.

Often when we run these facilitations, we learn a lot about the complexity of the environment and the inconvenience the customer puts up with when experiencing the issue they've asked us to help with. It's not always clear in these types of environment whose problem it is to fix, i.e Hardware vendor, Application, Middle Tier, Networking Infrastructure etc. If there is a piece of Sun somewhere in there, we are happy to help move the understanding on into the right area, Sun or not.

We also find that sometimes, the facilitation brings teams together who work day to day solving issues, but often the facilitation session is the first time they have all been co-located, working as a team in the same room to solve the issue(s).

When we go through the process, in most cases we find more than one concern, often many, and determine which one or ones are the most serious, and tackle those first.

In this particular customer's case, they were experiencing some slowness at random times of the day, although a fairly regular slowdown around 4pm, however, through questioning we determined that this slowdown of the system at around 4pm was evident long before the Sun system was in place. They were coming up to a particularly busy period in their business, and wanted it to go smoothly.

We left after a day of troubleshooting with some suggested actions for the customer to undertake, some of which the customer already had in motion before we got there, and some actions resulting from troubleshooting and using knowledge and experience.

In my experience, they key areas to focus on with these types of issues, is When exactly did it happen ? and What was the user doing at the time they noticed the issue ?

The What the user is doing, is what we call the Lifecycle, what was going on on the system at the time. From a troubleshooting perspective, this information is key in being able to link that back to any system or network logs that can help explain what the user saw.

On Site facilitation is always a challenging but very enjoyable piece of my work. I am sure there are more problems we can help Sun's customers with. I'll be reminding our Account Teams shortly how they can engage us.

If you are a Sun customer, and have an issue you think we might be able to help with, feel free to contact us. We have skilled facilitators in most parts of the world. We usualy find a willing volunteer within 24 hours.

Mark Hayden (2008-03-03 03:03:18.0) Permalink Comments [1]