A framework for structured troubleshooting

Every network engineer who has some exposure to networking has found Murphy's Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, to be true. If a network is delivering services, there is a good chance that it will experience problems at times. The goal of the network engineers is to proactively identify and prevent these incidents from happening. We discussed the details around proactive monitoring in Chapter 10, A Systematic Approach to Network Operations. Regardless of the amount of proactive monitoring, things go wrong that cannot be predicted and the network engineer is required to do a lot of network troubleshooting to help resolve issues as quickly as possible. We will cover these aspects of reactive troubleshooting in this chapter.

Divide and rule have always been the driving success factors to solve complex problems. If we can break a complex problem down into its constituent parts and solve them individually, things become manageable. However...