Best Practices for Identifying Issues
You can’t resolve issues that you don’t know about. It is important to identify and capture issues as soon as they surface and not wait for someone to ask for help. There is typically a time delay of anywhere from a few hours to a few days from the time an issue first surfaces until someone reports it and asks for help – especially if technology is involved. People understand that technology has issues from time to time and they expect a certain amount of normal technology disruption. They will often wait to report issues until either the time is convenient for them or the impact of the issue has escalated to the point of becoming a significant disruption.
The time delay in issue reporting creates an excellent opportunity for support organizations to proactively resolve issues before users report them. Doing this requires using some support capabilities to capture issues when they occur. Some of the most common issue identification capabilities are:
Service monitoring
Component, system, and service monitoring capabilities enable support teams to identify when services aren’t operating the way they are expected to. Degraded performance, connectivity issues, and system availability issues can all be captured by service monitors.
Embedded support functions
Most software that people use in both their business and personal activities include some sort of help function. Sometimes this is training documentation or troubleshooting steps, but most software can also be configured to alert support resources when a user accesses a help function or encounters an error. This enables support teams to start troubleshooting technical and data related issues more quickly
Error logging
Not all errors and system issues are visible to end users. Resilient software architectures are designed to handle exceptions and certain errors automatically and maintain service availability. Just because the user didn’t see an error doesn’t mean that the service doesn’t have an issue. Error logging should include notification to support and/or development resources that an issue was encountered so they can work on resolving it.