Chapter 13. Troubleshooting Tools, Tips, and Tricks

Troubleshooting is an essential part of the everyday life of IT administrators and consultants. In fact, some people that I've talked to spend as much as 60-70% of their time troubleshooting issues. Whether it's helping users on help desk calls or working on a configuration problem or a bug in a production system, the time it takes to resolve these problems directly impacts the business operations of a company. On some occasions, the financial losses from system downtimes are tremendous. Companies who have tens of thousands of employees servicing millions of customers worldwide (think stock trading platforms) simply can't afford to have complete production outages in their IT environment. For this reason, as much as I love IT, being an IT administrator can be a very stressful job, especially when systems aren't performing well and users complain all the time. In this sense, supporting a Citrix environment...