Finding a fault that was not where everyone was looking

Intermittent slowness blamed on the ERP system turned out to be a routing problem. A short piece on diagnosing by layer rather than by suspicion.

IT Support Officer · Greenhouse International Development Group Ghana Ltd.

TODO
time to resolution: TODO
affected users

The reported symptom

The complaint was that the ERP system was slow. It usually is the application, so that is where people look first — and where I would have wasted a day if I had started there.

TODO: describe what users actually reported, and what made you doubt the obvious explanation.

Working down the layers

Application slowness and network latency present identically to a user. The difference shows up as soon as you measure rather than ask.

TODO: describe the sequence you actually followed — what you measured, what each result ruled out, and the point at which the picture changed.

The actual fault

TODO: what it turned out to be, how you fixed it, and what you put in place so it would be caught sooner next time.

TroubleshootingFibreRoutingLatency