Troubleshooting Techniques: Troubleshooting Remotely | Tech, No Babel

Transcript: This is a problem that you might have. Maybe generally you’re going to be doing your troubleshooting in person. What happens if you go on vacation? You may not be the head person. You just might know a lot about 1 particular thing or maybe they can’t reach someone else or someone else called in sick or what have you. Doesn’t matter what the case is. What matters is you might have to do some remote troubleshooting. I though I’d put together some guidelines that I developed over the years. I wrote them all just tonight, but just ideas that I figured out as I was doing tech support and things that might help you.
First, ask a lot of questions. If you’re troubleshooting remotely, you don’t have all the information. What you could do if you were in person, is you could glance here, you could glance there. You could unplug something. You could plug it in. You could do all these things that you just can’t do remotely. Asking a lot of questions will give you a lot of information.
Secondly, look for evidence to rule out your hypothesis. This is going to be counter-intuitive, but here’s what I want you to do. I want you to once you have an idea of what you think is the cause, look for reasons why that’s not the cause. If you think, “Well, it’s just not plugged in.” Ask, “Are there any lights on it anywhere?” Ask, “Can you double-check that the cable is plugged in firmly?” Ask these kinds of questions to rule out your hypothesis that it’s just not plugged in. Approach it not from the standpoint of, “I’m right, and I’m a genius,” but from the standpoint of humility and thinking, “Okay, is there information that I can gather that would counteract this hypothesis?” Because that might be able to limit some of the possible things that you might think are going wrong that actually aren’t. That’s a valuable technique.
Next, devise tests. Think of, “Okay. If this is true, how can I test to make sure it’s true?” If it’s a bad cable, replacing the cable with another one should make it good. If you have, let’s say it’s 2 cameras. You have a problem coming from a monitor that’s connected to the camera and the camera. Well, all things being equal, if you swap every piece but the camera, the problem should follow the cables and the monitor. Then, swap the monitors. The problem should still follow the cable. If that’s not true, then you’ve devised a test that’s given you different information, and it might show that you have a faulty connector or something like that. Maybe you’ve got a power supply that’s gone bad, anything like that, but devising these tests will help you eliminate possible causes.
Next, use the best communication medium that you can. Now, that we’re in the 21st century, a lot of people have iPads or Android tablets or smartphones, et cetera. They can stream live video from wherever they are to wherever you are. That might just be the key. You could be talking to someone and go, “Hey, can you show me the back of the rack?” Then, you look back there, and there’s supposed to be lights, but there are no lights, or there are lights above and below but not on the piece that you’re concerned about. Any of those things will help you see more information. Now, it could be that that’s not something that you can do but maybe it is. If it is and it helps, do it. If it won’t help, it there’s not enough light in the room, if it’s too noisy to hear, et cetera, then move on quickly. Use the best communications medium that you can.
Now, if you can’t see whether the room is too dark, and you just can’t get light in there. It’s behind a rack where there’s no good way to see. Sometimes just having the person describe what they see as if you can’t see, because you can’t see, is a great solution. You can say to them, “Okay, now go to the back of the rack. You should see a big piece of equipment, 2 little ones, and then the next one down, that one. Can you tell me, on the left hand side, how many cables are coming out of there?” You see that? You’re guiding them to describe to you what you cannot see. Describing what you can’t see sometimes illuminates what is actually going on as well.
Next, sometimes you’ll run into a situation where the person doesn’t believe you. They just think, “Well, that’s impossible. That doesn’t make sense.” If that’s the case, instead telling them that they’re wrong, telling them they’re an idiot, making all sorts of crude comments. I mean, if you’re good friend and you can joke, that’s one thing, but if you do any of that then a better way to do it to devise a test to help them see it.
The next one goes along with this, is don’t go into telling someone that they’re wrong. Help them realize that they’re wrong. It’s also a great step in the troubleshooting process to do tests to see if you can prove that you are in fact wrong, going back to 1 of my earlier tips, because that will give you more information.
Next, give bad news early. It is not going to help anyone if you take an hour to tell someone what you suspected in the first 5 minutes that, “Yup, it was hit by lightning. No there’s nothing we can do today.” That’s bad news. It just is. Taking an hour to tell someone that when you suspected in 5 minutes, that’s no good. What you want to do is you want to break bad news early. Maybe what you say instead of, “Yup, totally broken. Getting off the phone with you.” Instead of saying that, say something like this, “I’m wondering if this piece has been struck by lightning. If that’s the case, we might not be able to do anything. Let’s see if it has been. Do you smell a burnt odor around this piece? Is there any scorch marks on the backside of this piece?”
Just look for something to see if you’re wrong. Approach it from the standpoint of you don’t want this to be broken. You want it to be something simple, but also let them know about the worst case scenario. Not in a, “Well, the glass is half-full, this is going to cost us $100,000.00 to fix. Oh, life is over.” Not from that standpoint, but from a, “We need to get to a solution as soon as possible.” If that means rewiring something, that means rewiring something. That means by-passing something, that means by-passing something. That means telling the pastor, “Turns out the thing we normally do, we can’t do. The thing you were hoping for us to do, can’t be done.” This is why you just want to get all that information out there.
Troubleshooting remotely has its challenges. There are things that as you approach them, it’s really difficult. Some of those problems are just the nature of the beast. You can’t see. Some of those problems are involving people that … People sometimes don’t want to hear that bad news. Sometimes those problems are equipment-related that almost nothing we make can withstand a direct lightning hit. That’s just the way that it is. As you’re troubleshooting remotely, help people try and explain what’s going on with them. Try and help them to see what’s actually going on, because it doesn’t help anyone if you feel like you’re right but you’re wrong, or they feel like they’re right but they’re wrong. It only helps if you can get to the truth of the matter and solve the problem. That is why we troubleshoot, and it really matters when we’re doing it remotely.