Introduction to IT and Cybersecurity
Video Description
Identifying the Problem We begin examining the troubleshooting process with its first step, Identifying the Problem. When identifying the problem you want to document "everything" from the moment the issue is noticed. Help desks and call centers confirm and document all information from user ID and location, to the nature of the problem and then finally on any solution/resolution that is deployed both for tracking purposes and for referral. You'll learn that treating personal computing devices the same way is invaluable and why that documentation of each variable from incident thru confirmed solution is essential.
Video Transcription
00:04
So let's take a look closer at our first step. Identify the problem now, when we're identifying the problem, we wantto document everything from start to finish as soon as we noticed the issue. Or if we're working on help center or help desk as soon as the issues brought to our attention, we want to start our documentation a lot of help. Desk centers.
00:22
Most call centers
00:24
have some sort of formal documentation that they're required to initiate as soon as the customer interaction. As soon as in a user interaction begins. You have toe document who the person is, where the what department they work in,
00:37
what, what the issue is, what their computer number is, and you want to go through these this documentation. You want to make sure that you're typing out everything you're doing
00:45
all the steps that you're taking in any resolution that you may have so that this could be referred to later. If the issue is to Riker
00:53
now,
00:54
if this is our own computer, we want to be asking ourselves some of these next questions. And if this is someone else's computer, we want to ask someone else these questions. If we're asking. Someone else sees questions and maybe a little bit difficult to get information out of them. If there's someone who isn't very talkative
01:11
now, if there's someone who is very talkative, it may be difficult to
01:14
stop getting information out of them. But it is good to have information. And we want to make sure that we're getting plenty of information from people regarding the issue, not just yes or no answers, because yes or no answers aren't. They're gonna give us a little bit of direction, but they're not going to lead us
01:32
in as good of a direction for solving an issue
01:34
as open ended Questions would. So we want to ask open ended questions like what was happening before this problem occurred. What were you working on? Has this problem happened before? Can you let me know if there were? Was there any error messages? And what did they say? If you saw any error messages,
01:53
was your computer acting weird in any way?
01:56
You wanna ask questions that someone can't just answer with yes or no? Or if your computer is acting weird? How was it acting weird? How long has it been acting weird. When you ask questions that can be answered with yes or no, someone may fall into just saying yes or no,
02:12
and that's not going to really get you anywhere. If you ask questions that have to be answered by a little bit longer a statement, then you'll get people start opening up. Maybe they'll just start with a sentence or two. But then, as you keep going, they'll say, Well, you see, I was working on my computer and, you know, a week ago this seem happened right after I
02:30
and then you start getting more information,
02:34
you start getting more leads and you get to be a little bit of computer detective almost and see if you can figure out what's caused this problem and what you can look at when you're troubleshooting.
02:46
So we asked, opening the questions. We want to ask about any recent changes to the computer. Any changes that they may be that may have been made on the hardware software, any programs or what they were doing, what led to the issue? What were they working on on their computer when this happened, or did they just turn on their computer when this happened.
03:06
If the computer isn't turning on
03:07
you, you also want to ask about other the environmental variables. You wanna ask about the people around them. If they can't connect to the Internet, can the person sitting next to them connect to the Internet? If they can't turn on their computer, can the person sit next to them? Turn on the computer? You have a caller and they say, Yeah, my computer won't turn on. And you
03:25
you're trying to troubleshoot the issue you're seeing. If the power cables plugged in, the power cable is plugged in.
03:30
There's no bio speak, sirs. Well,
03:34
are the lights on in your office? Oh, no. We had a power outage. Well, there's your problem. So we want to make sure that we are asking what led to the issue what's going on around that person and what other users who are right next to them may be experiencing. And this may help us narrow down where the issue is.
03:54
We want to ask, Is this intermittent, or has this happened before? So is this an issue that is always happening? Eyes it continuously ongoing. Do they do They constantly not have Internet Or is it intermittent? Is it on and off? Will it come back on in five minutes? We'll and then we'll go away.
04:13
Or is it Has it happened before? And if they say, Oh, yeah, this happened about two weeks ago and so on. So fix it
04:17
for me. Well, then we might want to go to so and so or not wantto call up so and so in an email and see if we can figure out what they did to fix it. This may save us a lot of time, or it may help us determine that if the fix that the previous person applied to it should have completely fixed the problem,
04:38
then we need to investigate a little bit deeper. We don't want to be
04:41
continue. We don't wanna be patching issues over and over and over with the same solution that doesn't completely fix the problem. This it's frustrating for people who are working on the computer if they don't know to tell us. Hey, this has already been tried and it works for about two days, and then my computer doesn't work anymore,
04:59
so we need to be aware of that. We need to be aware that we want to ask.
05:01
Has this happened before? Is this an intermittent issue?
05:06
So when we're identifying the problem, we want to make sure that we perform a backup of anything before we make any changes to the computer. If we're going to change any settings, if we're gonna change any registry keys, we want to make sure that we back up the settings in these options
05:21
or we at least document them down. We document what settings were changing and what we're changing them from.
05:28
So if the issue becomes worse or we create a new issue, we'll know what settings to go back to so that we don't. We don't make the problem worse. We'll be able to go back to those settings without
05:40
running into even more issues. And we also want to back up any files, especially before we make any major chatting changes on a computer or if we are going to start changing hard drive information or for him to start closing documents that the user was working on When I just wanna make sure we're saving those files that the person was working on that we were working on
06:00
we're back. We might want to back up
06:00
important files from our computer to the network to an external hard drive, just in case something were to happen. Just in case that computer would've fail, we would still have those files. So and we wouldn't
06:14
even be blamed for causing making the problem worse and making someone lose all of their work. So
06:20
this is a recap when we're identifying the problem. We want to make sure that we're a TTE. The very beginning. We start documenting everything and we're documenting throughout our entire troubleshooting process. We want to make sure that we're questioning users. We don't just start jumping in and trying to solve the problem
06:36
just because someone calls and says, Hey, I don't have Internet. We don't want to jump in and start.
06:41
Okay, Can I can I go here and let's see if we can? We can pin your default gateway. Let's see if here is your cable plugged in, you would want to make sure that we we start out by asking them questions. We don't start out by establishing a theory and testing our own are testing our own theories. We need to see what's going on in their environment.
06:59
See what's happened before and see if we can
07:00
rule out some variables right away without even having to touch any settings without even having the user change any hardware settings on their computer.
07:11
Well, then, lastly, want to make sure that we perform backups of options, settings and files before we actually start making any changes on our computer?
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Diagnosing system malfunctions and finding a solution is an important skill for help desk professionals to develop. Expand your knowledge of the troubleshooting theory in less than an hour.
Instructed By
Anthony Harris
Instructor