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CCNP ENARSI (300-410) : BASIC TSHOOT CONCEPTS

1. 2_1- Structured Troubleshooting

In this section, we are going to talk about structured troubleshooting. We have shown in the previous lesson that the general troubleshooting process is happening in the form of tasks and subprocessors. Now we will focus on these steps in a little more detail. All troubleshooting tasks begin with defining the problem. However, what triggers the troubleshooting exercise is a failure experienced by someone who reports it to the support group. The figure illustrates reporting of the problem done by the user as the trigger action, followed by verification and definition of the problem done by the support group. Unless an organisation has a strict policy on how problems are reported, the reported problem can unfortunately be vague or even misleading. Problem reports can look like the following:

When I try to go to this location on the Internet, I get a page that says I don't have permission, for example, or maybe the mail server isn't working or I can't file my expense report. As you might have noticed, the second statement is merely a conclusion a user has drawn, perhaps merely because he cannot send or receive email. To prevent wasting a lot of time during the troubleshooting process based on false assumptions and claims, the first step of troubleshooting is always verifying and defining the problem. The problem must first be verified and then defined by you, the support engineer, not the user guys, and it has to be defined clearly.

A good problem definition must also include information about when the problem started, if there have been any recent changes or upgrades, and how widespread the problem is. Knowing that the problem is experienced by a single user only and not others or that the problem has affected a group of users is quite valuable. It affects your analysis, eliminating causes, formulating a hypothesis about the root cause of the problem, and your choice of troubleshooting approach. A good problem description consists of an accurate statement of symptoms, not interpretations or conclusions. Consequences for the users are, strictly speaking, not part of the problem description itself but can prove helpful to assess the urgency of the issue. When a problem is reported, such as the mail server not working, you must contact the user and find out exactly what he has experienced. When the user launches his email client, he will most likely receive an error message stating that the client cannot connect to the server.

The user can continue to access his network drives and browse the Internet. So the next step is gathering information. Select your initial troubleshooting method and create an information gathering plan before gathering information. You must identify the targets for the information gathering processes as part of this plan. The next step is analysing the information. During the analysis of the gathered information, you are typically trying to determine two things: what is happening on the network and what should be happening. Actually, if you discover the differences between these two, you can collect clues for what is wrong or at least a direction to take for further information gathering. And the next thing we're going to focus on is eliminating the potential causes. Analyzing the gathered information while considering and incorporating existing information such as the network baseline and documentation helps you eliminate many potential causes.

You must make note of the important influence that your assumptions have on eliminating the potential causes. Assumptions may or may not be true. If you end up with conflicting conclusions or scenarios that make no sense, you might have to reevaluate your assumptions by gathering more information and analysing the new information accordingly. Then, after this step, we need to propose hypotheses. The proposed hypothesis leads us to the next stage of the structured troubleshooting process. Testing the hypothesis If you decide to escalate the problem, ask yourself whether this ends your involvement in the process. If you cannot solve the problem and it is too urgent to wait for the problem to be solved through an escalation, you may need to come up with a workaround. Usually, implementing a possible solution involves making changes to the network. Therefore, if your organisation has defined procedures for regular network maintenance, you must follow your organization's regular change procedures. If the problem is not solved, you need to have a way to undo your change and revert to the original situation. Then your troubleshooting job is not complete until you communicate that the problem has been solved. At a minimum, you will have to communicate back to the original user. That's the problem. If you have involved others as part of the escalation process, however, you should communicate with them too.

CCNP ENARSI (300-410) : NETWORK MAINTENANCE AND BEST PRACTICES

1. 3_1- Structured Network Maintenance

In this section, we are going to talk about a structured network maintenance overview. Depending on the size and type of organization, some or all of the following may be included in the maintenance tasks: device installation and maintenance failure response monitoring, network performance auditing, business procedures, implementing security procedures, and security auditing. The structured approach to network maintenance has some clear benefits over the interrupt-driven approach, including reduced network downtime cost-effectiveness, better alignment with business objectives, and higher network security.

2. 3_2- Network Maintenance Process and Procedures

In this section, we are going to talk about network maintenance processes and procedures. Network maintenance procedures are the steps to establishing procedures that fit an organization's needs for a good network maintenance process. You need to identify network maintenance tasks, recognise and describe the advantages of scheduled maintenance, and evolve the key decision factors that affect change control. Procedures describe the essential elements of network documentation and its function plan for efficient disaster recovery, and they describe the importance of network monitoring and performance measurement as an integral element of a proactive network maintenance strategy. And let's take a look at the common maintenance tasks first.

The first thing we're going to focus on is accommodating ads, moves, and chains. Networks, as you know, are constantly being built. As people move and offices are changed and restructured, network devices such as computers, printers, and servers might need to be moved, and configuration and cabling might be necessary. This adds movement, and the chains are normal parts of network maintenance. The second common maintenance task is the installation and configuration of new devices. This task includes adding ports, link capacity, network devices, and so on. Implementation of new technologies or installation and configuration of new devices is either handled by a different group within your organization, by an external party, or by internal staff.

The other thing we are going to focus on is the replacement of the failed devices. Whether the replacement of failed devices is done through service contracts or done in-house by support engineers, it is an important network maintenance task. And the other thing we are going to focus on is backup of device configurations and software. This task is linked to the task of replacing failed devices. Without good backups of both software and configurations, the time to replace failed equipment or recover from several device failures will not be trouble-free and might take a long time. Let's go ahead with the software upgrade or patching. Network maintenance requires that you stay informed of available software upgrades or patches and use them if necessary. Critical performance or security vulnerabilities are often addressed by software upgrades or patches. And the next thing we are going to focus on is network monitoring.

Monitoring the operation of the devices and user activity on the network is also part of a network maintenance plan. Network monitoring can be performed using simple mechanisms such as the collection of router and firewall logs or by using sophisticated network monitoring applications. And next, we are going to take a look at performance measurement and capacity planning because the demand for bandwidth is continually increasing. Another network maintenance task is to perform at least some basic measurements to decide when it's time to upgrade links or equipment and to justify the cost of the corresponding investments. This proactive approach allows one to plan for upgrades. For example, capacity planning occurs before bottlenecks are formed, congestion is experienced, or failures occur. And the last thing we are going to focus on is writing and updating the documentation. Preparing proper network documentation that describes the current state of the network for reference during implementation, administration, and troubleshooting is a mandatory network maintenance task.

Within most organizations, network documentation must be kept current. Let's take a look at planning network maintenance right now. If you plan your maintenance, network downtime is reduced. Long-term maintenance tasks would not be neglected or forgotten. And you'll have predictable lead times for change requests. And when you formalise change control procedures, you need the answers to some questions. And they are which types of changes necessitate authorization and who is in charge of authorising them. Changes in maintenance must be made during a maintenance window; changes in change can be made immediately. What kind of preparation needs to be done before executing a change? What kind of verification needs to be done to confirm that the change was effective? What other actions, such as updating documentation, need to be taken after a successful change? What actions should be taken when a change has unexpected results or causes problems? What conditions allow skipping some of the normal change procedures? And which elements of the procedures should still be followed?

And the third thing we are going to take a look at when planning and performing network maintenance is network documentation. When you create network documentation procedures, you need to pay attention to network drawings, connection documentation, equipment lists, IP address administration configurations, and design documentation. Let's start with the network drawings. Diagrams of the physical and logical structure of the network should always be up-to-date, guys. And when we take a look at the connection documentation, this documentation lists all relevant physical connections, such as patches, connections to server providers, and power circuits. And let's take a look at equipment lists and these lists of all devices, part numbers, serial numbers installed, software versions, software licences, warranty information, and service information. When we look at the IPaddress administration, we can see that it lists the IP subnet, sham, and all IP addresses in use.

And the next piece of documentation is the configuration documentation. And this is a set of all current device configurations, or even an archive that contains all previous configurations. And the last piece of documentation can be design documentation. And this is a document describing the motivation behind certain implementation choices. All right, one of the most important things that we need to focus on when we prepare a maintenance plan is effective communication. Guys. If actions, test results, and conclusions are not communicated between team members, the process in the hands of one team member can be disruptive to the process handled by another team member. You don't want to create new problems by solving other problems. As you know, we also need to find the answers to this question: who is making changes and when? How does the change affect the others? What are the results of the tests that were done, and what conclusions can be drawn? Another component of the maintenance plan is defining templates, procedures, and conventions.

In many cases, you can configure a device in several different ways to achieve the same results. Using different methods to achieve the same result in the same network, on the other hand, can easily lead to confusion, particularly during troubleshooting. Under pressure, valuable time can be wasted in verifying configurations that are assumed to be incorrect simply because they are configured differently. The last part of the maintenance plan is establishing a disaster recovery plan. The key factors to a successful disaster recovery are defining and documenting the recovery procedures and making sure that you always have the necessary elements available in case a disaster strikes. For example, if one of your core routers fails, you must replace it by replacing the hardware, the current software version for the device, the current configuration for the device, the tools to transfer software and configuration to the device, and, if applicable, licences and lots. Maybe the knowledge of the procedures to install the software configuration and the licenses.

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