First Order of Business: What Problem Are You Troubleshooting?

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Functional Overview

The most important part of troubleshooting is to understand how your particular application works. Functionally, what services, daemons, or processes are started as a result of a backup job being executed? Backup applications are like avalanches; once the backup job starts, it tends to spawn several other supporting processes to accomplish the task. Therefore, being able to track the relationship of these services, processes, and daemons is the first step in your journey to troubleshooting your environment. If you don't have a good solid understanding of the backup architecture and functional overview, your troubleshooting will be hit-or-miss. We have seen many backup administrators troubleshoot a problem from the entirely wrong direction, thus losing valuable time. If your software vendor hasn't published such an overview, contact them and request it. Ask as many people as you can to get this information, because without it, you won't have all the right tools necessary to maintain your environment properly.

Whatever the case, you should document for yourself how the software is deployed on your environment. If this is an inherited environment, you should have either an outside consultant or internal IT staff perform a site assessment to document your current state. It's always better to do this assessment before you have the trouble looming over your head so you can be prepared and proactive.

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