Article Written by Kong Yang, Head Geek, SolarWinds
The on-demand economy has raised user expectations and put more pressure on businesses to deliver. That pressure is passed on to IT professionals. They must become even more diligent about the overall health of their data centers, proactively identifying, solving, and preventing issues to ensure uptime. Otherwise, the end-user experience will be negatively affected and the bottom line potentially impacted.
Such troubleshooting is a core IT skill, but doing so in virtualized environments often gets overlooked in favor of remediation. After all, IT professionals are primarily expected to fix issues and do so quickly. Failure to solve problems efficiently puts their jobs at risk. Unfortunately, this assumption, along with “do more with less” edicts, leave little time for finding the root cause of a problem, i.e., troubleshooting.
The escalating complexity of technology constructs adds even more variables to effective troubleshooting, especially in virtualized environments that run across networking, physical servers and storage arrays. Factor in separate teams being responsible for each area and the involvement of so many stakeholders complicates the troubleshooting process even more.
These siloed teams can lead to the presence of what we call “IT seagulls”-people who swoop in, make a mess of the troubleshooting drill, spin the blame, and fly away unscathed. IT seagulls are typically not on the frontline, therefore don’t have the proper information and context to root cause the incident that they’re troubleshooting. They will, however, take credit for any problems solved.
Throwing cloud into the mix inserts another layer of abstracted difficulty, as most businesses don’t have full breadth of visibility outside of their own firewalls. Multi-platform troubleshooting is a real pain point, especially for traditional, disciplined IT professionals.
The challenge is in understanding the scope, scale and technology spread in hybrid IT environments. The answer is visibility, which is the basis for monitoring with discipline.
In fact, according to the 2017 SolarWinds IT Trends Report, 69 percent of the IT professionals surveyed currently use up to three cloud provider environments, and 9 percent of this group use 10 or more. It may seem like things in the cloud can be easily tracked, catalogued and managed, but IT practitioners realize that knowing everything about your off-premises, virtual machines-i.e., what services they are connected to both internally and externally, as well as how they are performing on and across cloud platforms-is nearly impossible without the proper tools and skill set.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the lack of control and visibility into the performance of cloud-based applications and hybrid IT infrastructure is cited as the number two challenge of hybrid IT environments per the IT Trends Report.
Troubleshooting Fundamentals
To simplify troubleshooting in today’s complicated IT environments, eight fundamental steps still apply:
1. Define the problem
2. Gather and analyze relevant information
3. Construct a hypothesis to the probable cause
4. Devise a plan to test hypothesis
5. Implement the plan
6. Record and analyze the results
7. Repeat steps 2-6 as necessary to determine the root cause
8. Document the solution
These troubleshooting fundamentals will provide rigor and discipline to IT processes, but those pesky IT seagulls can still wreak havoc. When it comes to mitigating the risk and damage caused by IT seagulls, be sure to stick to the data.
Backing up your approach with information helps create the right focus and eliminates the IT blame game. Correlate that data across multiple platforms and collaborate with other IT teams to find common ground and break down silos.
This should lead to better context of the issue as you leverage the expertise and experience of your subject matter experts. And, of course, use a systematic and disciplined approach by applying the eight troubleshooting steps.
Three Actions for Troubleshooting Virtualized Environments
For troubleshooting virtualized environments, I recommend three actions:
- Leverage active and proactive alerts to prevent issues that are coming down the pipeline. For example, use a monitoring tool to establish performance baselines for your environment. This allows you to set up and customize alert thresholds for key performance indicators that quickly surface and categorize any impending issues.
- Leverage existing knowledge bases and best practices to troubleshoot virtualization issues. Turning to established, well-known fixes will streamline problem solving and make your virtualization more efficient and effective.
- Build your own knowledge base and best practices. In troubleshooting virtualized environments, you’ll often run into first-time issues or those unique to your environment without enough information to fully root cause the problem. Collect and correlate key performance metrics across your entire stack, including networking, infrastructure and application services. By doing so, you’ll be more prepared to prevent the same problem.
The future of troubleshooting consists of being able to combine and correlate time-series metrics as well as historical performance metrics from multiple hybrid IT data sources, including applications, compute, network, storage, virtualization, web and the cloud, into a single dashboard that quickly surfaces the single point of truth.
Closing with the Right Tools
The health of your data center can reflect the health of the business. Both must be able to handle adjusting and acclimating to changing market conditions. As cloud, virtualization, hybrid IT and hyper-converged infrastructure continue to transform IT management and troubleshooting, there’s a pressing need to accelerate the troubleshooting process.
To do this effectively, having the right capabilities to monitor with discipline is the key to success. Indeed, IT professionals are honing monitoring with discipline skills and utilizing proper management tools-38 percent of IT Trends Report respondents indicated they intended to focus on their growth in these areas.
Never underestimate the power of monitoring with discipline to debug issues in virtualized environments. The right monitoring tool set combined with a proper troubleshooting protocol are your best tactics against the volume, velocity and variety of IT complexities in virtualized, hybrid IT environments.
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About the Author
Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds with over 20 years of IT experience specializing in virtualization and cloud management. He is a VMware vExpert, Cisco Champion, and active contributing thought leader within the virtualization community.
