16. Troubleshooting the problems

This post describes how to you troubleshoot the any problems.

As mention on the post 4. UML that simple diagrams will save you lot of time for the explanation. So I am going to draw diagram here to show how we can troubleshoot the problems if website or application is not working and the same troubleshooting funda can applicable for other problems too.

Diagram:

As of now, I can think of that the following other ways to help to troubleshoot the problem.

Notes:

1. Use Fiddler to inspect your HTTP traffic.
2. Check Event Viewer and exception logging database if you have for that website or application.
3. If your website hosted on Web Farm(same website hosted on multiple web servers), then very hard to find the request coming from which web server, So in order to trouble shoot the problems easily I would suggest to define the customer http headers on IIS using “HTTP Response Headers”  for each web servers. For example, please refer the below picture and you will understand that.

4. If your website or application build up with many layers (say UI, BAL, Web Service, Data, caching …etc.) then I would suggest to write the simple script to make sure everything is working on individual layers including connectivity and calling simple methods…etc. Because this will save us lot of time. For example, if there is a problem on DB then if we execute the script and script will tell us straightaway where is the problem instead of looking from web servers and narrow down the issue to other layers.

5.  Setup instant notifications via email or SMS for your production environments if any critical problems are happened or any health check issues.

6. Prepare the support manual documentation and use it for when the problems are happened and this document also very useful for future support/developers.

7. To work our applications on all of the modern browsers, sometimes, we need to write separate working block for the some of the functionalities for specific browsers. For example, our testers say it’s not working on Chrome or IE…etc. then we need fine the alternative working solution of that.

8. Please use networking commands to troubleshoot the problems for network related issues.

I hope you enjoy reading this post. Please contact me if you have any questions.