Solved Why restart works ? Technical reason ?
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@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
Instead of re-imaging?
I just wonder, how we can simply jump to re-imaging or reset or re-installation, unless necessary or investigating the issue, it may repeat if cause is not from that computer...?
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@openit said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
Instead of re-imaging?
I just wonder, how we can simply jump to re-imaging or reset or re-installation, unless necessary or investigating the issue, it may repeat if cause is not from that computer...?
It "may" repeat, but the chances are extremely low if you have an issue on one machine. More importantly - investigating causes is extremely expensive and generally worthless (we rarely find something at all, and when we do, it is rarely of value.) That something "may repeat" sounds important, but it makes something trivial sound scary.
In real life, 99%+ of issues that we experience on an end user machine are from the end user machine and can be fixed by starting with a clean copy. A good process for this lowers cost and raises protection as imaging fixes many problems that we might not even have known about. Imaging is a much safer process, investigating leaves us often unsure if we've found "everything" and if we've fully fixed it.
So imaging is often where we almost start, because it is fast, reliable, and cost effective for the business. IT always wants to "know what was wrong", but ask the business if this makes sense. To the company, the right answer is the one that saves money, not the one that gets to the bottom of things.
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In an ideal world, of course, we'd track down every problem and solve it. This not only means we always know what happened, but we know how to prevent it, in theory.
But the real world doesn't work that way very often. Tracking down a problem is generally time consuming, and unreliable. And finding one problem might hide another. A problem that causes instability might hide one that causes data loss, for example.
Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower. With a "good" setup, it might easily be only 15-20 minutes. And with VDI you might be looking at mere seconds or at single minute, at most. These numbers are getting really small.
In many cases, an L0 helpdesk tech can have a serious issue resolved via imaging before someone who knows enough to figure out the issue can even respond.
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Now, of course, if you have loads of IT free time and this kind of investigation becomes the absolute best use of IT's time, then you can consider things like having replacement machines ready to go and swapping, rather than re-imaging, and then you can take the old equipment or snapped VM to a "lab" for investigation while not impacting the business to do so. But, in most cases, this is only available to companies with rather deep pockets as spare gear is rarely cheap.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
In an ideal world, of course, we'd track down every problem and solve it. This not only means we always know what happened, but we know how to prevent it, in theory.
But the real world doesn't work that way very often. Tracking down a problem is generally time consuming, and unreliable. And finding one problem might hide another. A problem that causes instability might hide one that causes data loss, for example.
Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower. With a "good" setup, it might easily be only 15-20 minutes. And with VDI you might be looking at mere seconds or at single minute, at most. These numbers are getting really small.
In many cases, an L0 helpdesk tech can have a serious issue resolved via imaging before someone who knows enough to figure out the issue can even respond.
Now granted it’s not Windows but we can rekickstart in about 10-15 mins.
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@stacksofplates said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
In an ideal world, of course, we'd track down every problem and solve it. This not only means we always know what happened, but we know how to prevent it, in theory.
But the real world doesn't work that way very often. Tracking down a problem is generally time consuming, and unreliable. And finding one problem might hide another. A problem that causes instability might hide one that causes data loss, for example.
Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower. With a "good" setup, it might easily be only 15-20 minutes. And with VDI you might be looking at mere seconds or at single minute, at most. These numbers are getting really small.
In many cases, an L0 helpdesk tech can have a serious issue resolved via imaging before someone who knows enough to figure out the issue can even respond.
Now granted it’s not Windows but we can rekickstart in about 10-15 mins.
Well, and kickstarting is not really all that fast. Full on imaging can be even faster.
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@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
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Another thing to consider is whether this is a workload you are managing as a service, or whether you are providing support to an end user using an endpoint to access services that you support. If it is an end user, the quickest route to addressing the problem is frequently having them reboot. There are usually far too many variables, that directly correlate to the other human in the equation, to afford a reasonable amount of time to adequately diagnose the root cause of the problem(s) they are experiencing.
However, if you are managing a service it is probably better to take a bit of time beforehand and set up proactive monitoring that will provide metrics that can be used to establish baseline patterns and trends that can in turn be observed and used to identify deviations that lead to undesirable application and system states. This will allow you to detect anomalous states and enable auto-healing features that will automatically remedy issues before they get to the point that a reboot is the necessary remediation.
If you are managing immutable/stateless workloads (containers/microservices) that use a service oriented architecture, this is much easier to implement and manage. If you're dealing with traditional monolithic applications it can up the difficulty of implementation by quite a bit.
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@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
There are (as always) some exceptions.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@stacksofplates said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
In an ideal world, of course, we'd track down every problem and solve it. This not only means we always know what happened, but we know how to prevent it, in theory.
But the real world doesn't work that way very often. Tracking down a problem is generally time consuming, and unreliable. And finding one problem might hide another. A problem that causes instability might hide one that causes data loss, for example.
Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower. With a "good" setup, it might easily be only 15-20 minutes. And with VDI you might be looking at mere seconds or at single minute, at most. These numbers are getting really small.
In many cases, an L0 helpdesk tech can have a serious issue resolved via imaging before someone who knows enough to figure out the issue can even respond.
Now granted it’s not Windows but we can rekickstart in about 10-15 mins.
Well, and kickstarting is not really all that fast. Full on imaging can be even faster.
Oh definitely. We only kickstart physical stuff and that’s because it’s easy to automate.
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@stacksofplates said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@stacksofplates said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
In an ideal world, of course, we'd track down every problem and solve it. This not only means we always know what happened, but we know how to prevent it, in theory.
But the real world doesn't work that way very often. Tracking down a problem is generally time consuming, and unreliable. And finding one problem might hide another. A problem that causes instability might hide one that causes data loss, for example.
Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower. With a "good" setup, it might easily be only 15-20 minutes. And with VDI you might be looking at mere seconds or at single minute, at most. These numbers are getting really small.
In many cases, an L0 helpdesk tech can have a serious issue resolved via imaging before someone who knows enough to figure out the issue can even respond.
Now granted it’s not Windows but we can rekickstart in about 10-15 mins.
Well, and kickstarting is not really all that fast. Full on imaging can be even faster.
Oh definitely. We only kickstart physical stuff and that’s because it’s easy to automate.
Just a couple points with this since I just redid some kickstart stuff.
- Kickstarting is hardware agnostic so there is that advantage over imaging.
- Kickstarts are really easy to automate. I have a playbook that builds kickstart configs based on a YAML dictionary. I put in the hostname, MAC, and some other misc data. It goes and builds kickstart files and the appropriate MAC based PXE boot file from the same dictionary.
- Images aren't OS specific and don't change with updates.
- It's still pretty fast. ~15 mins for a full install + updates. ~10 mins for just an install.
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@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
There are (as always) some exceptions.
I did this years ago. And no exceptions. The owner buys in to it or he doesn't.
The reduction of support costs is always the winning decision.
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@jaredbusch said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
There are (as always) some exceptions.
I did this years ago. And no exceptions. The owner buys in to it or he doesn't.
The reduction of support costs is always the winning decision.
Yes, from the perspective of a company using service provider.
But I get paid hourly, so from this companies perspective, it costs the same regardless.
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@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@jaredbusch said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
There are (as always) some exceptions.
I did this years ago. And no exceptions. The owner buys in to it or he doesn't.
The reduction of support costs is always the winning decision.
Yes, from the perspective of a company using service provider.
But I get paid hourly, so from this companies perspective, it costs the same regardless.
Sure - which is just one more reason that Scott and others say that most SMBs shouldn't have onstaff IT.
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@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@jaredbusch said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
There are (as always) some exceptions.
I did this years ago. And no exceptions. The owner buys in to it or he doesn't.
The reduction of support costs is always the winning decision.
Yes, from the perspective of a company using service provider.
But I get paid hourly, so from this companies perspective, it costs the same regardless.
No it does not. Because you are wasting time (money) doing tasks that are not needed if you would have the reboots scheduled.
It may be the same to your paycheck, but it is not the same to the company. That is always the point of people trying to justify their jobs. Or of the SMB owner thinking he is saving money by using internal staff of lower skill.
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@jaredbusch said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@jaredbusch said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
There are (as always) some exceptions.
I did this years ago. And no exceptions. The owner buys in to it or he doesn't.
The reduction of support costs is always the winning decision.
Yes, from the perspective of a company using service provider.
But I get paid hourly, so from this companies perspective, it costs the same regardless.
No it does not. Because you are wasting time (money) doing tasks that are not needed if you would have the reboots scheduled.
It may be the same to your paycheck, but it is not the same to the company. That is always the point of people trying to justify their jobs. Or of the SMB owner thinking he is saving money by using internal staff of lower skill.
Yeah, but there are exceptions... not my decision, not my argument.
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@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@jaredbusch said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@jaredbusch said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@tim_g said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
@eddiejennings said in Why restart works ? Technical reason ?:
I'll often have users do a restart, but if the issue is recurring, then I'll take the time to try to find the root cause.
We do a minimum of forced weekly reboot of computers with updates, regardless of whether or not updates are installed.
It's been helping a LOT, and is a free way to fix or prevent many issues that waste time and effort from nobody rebooting.
There are (as always) some exceptions.
I did this years ago. And no exceptions. The owner buys in to it or he doesn't.
The reduction of support costs is always the winning decision.
Yes, from the perspective of a company using service provider.
But I get paid hourly, so from this companies perspective, it costs the same regardless.
No it does not. Because you are wasting time (money) doing tasks that are not needed if you would have the reboots scheduled.
It may be the same to your paycheck, but it is not the same to the company. That is always the point of people trying to justify their jobs. Or of the SMB owner thinking he is saving money by using internal staff of lower skill.
Yeah, but there are exceptions... not my decision, not my argument.
of course, if the decision is out of your hands, absolutely that's not on you - just like Mike Davis spending 4 hrs working on a PC issue and costing more than the value of the PC - because the decision maker told them to.
