Conducting a root-cause analysis

Once you solve a problem on your server or network, you'll immediately revel in the awesomeness of your troubleshooting skills. It's a wonderful feeling to have fixed an issue, becoming the hero within your technology department. But you're not done yet. The next step is looking toward preventing this problem from happening again. While we'll dive deeper into preventing future disasters in our next chapter, it's important to look at how the problem started as well as steps you can take in order to help stop the problem from occurring again. This is known as a root-cause analysis. A root-cause analysis may be a report you file with your manager or within your knowledge-base system, or it could just be a memo you document for yourself. Either way, it's an important learning opportunity.

A good root-cause analysis has several sides to the equation. First, it will demonstrate the events that led to the problem occurring in the first...