Linux Administration Cookbook

How to do it...

When troubleshooting an issue, there's some important first steps to take:

1. Get a drink of your choice, or ask someone nicely to make one for you (if the incident is so serious it requires an immediate immediate response). Try to avoid this drink being alcoholic. I usually go for tea.
2. Ensure you know what raised the alert. Generally, this will be from a monitoring system, or a panicked shift engineer on the other end of the phone. This is a good jumping-off point for the next step.
3. Get the impact of the problem; for example, does it mean that the website is down and no one can do their Christmas shopping, or is the system that routes incoming support calls down? This will help you to assess the importance of the issue.