When the customer is having a problem with the output of the system, my first reaction is to check the logs and try to recreate the problem.

In this case, the customer has a number of employees who use the system. He didn’t know why something wasn’t working and didn’t bother asking his employees in this case, but immediately sent me an email.

I didn’t have much time this morning to investigate and looking into the logs has proven to be a long process trying to interpret them and recreate the issue. Perhaps this should indicate to me I need better logging to more easily recreate issues. But I digress.

I just called the employee who created the record in question. They told me the system seemed to be hanging so they killed it with Task Manager and restarted it.

This was during a database dump I was doing. So putting the pieces together I was able to tell the client this and he told me that was fine and he didn’t need me to do anything or more info. What could have taken me longer with log investigation, I was able to discover up front by discussing with the employee.

So what is the takeaway for me here? Just to make sure I am investigating all my options to uncover the problem and that I should add talking directly to the employee who was last working on the record before heading directly to the log.