Troubleshooting and Debugging Techniques

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/troubleshooting-debugging-techniques

Introduction

**Course Review: Troubleshooting and Debugging Techniques on Coursera** If you're entrenched in the world of IT, you understand that encountering problems is a part of the job. The ability to swiftly identify and solve these issues is crucial to maintaining an efficient workflow and ensuring that systems run smoothly. With this in mind, Coursera's "Troubleshooting and Debugging Techniques" course emerges as an excellent choice for anyone looking to enhance their problem-solving skills in an IT context. ### Course Overview The course is designed to equip participants with practical tools and strategies for troubleshooting and debugging. It delves into real-world scenarios, providing insights into common pitfalls that IT professionals face. The curriculum covers a range of subjects, from the fundamental concepts of troubleshooting to more complex issues relating to application performance. ### Syllabus Breakdown 1. **Troubleshooting Concepts**: This foundational module introduces key debugging principles, guiding learners through various strategies to tackle problems effectively. You will familiarize yourself with essential tools like tcpdump and ps, crucial for debugging tasks. Understanding how to define and articulate the problem is emphasized. Additionally, you'll learn important search techniques, including binary and linear searches, and how to identify invalid data within CSV files. 2. **Slowness**: Discover what can cause a machine or software to lag. This module emphasizes identifying bottlenecks and using tools such as iotop and iftop to monitor resource utilization. You'll learn efficient coding practices, how data structures affect performance, and advanced techniques like concurrency and caching that can mitigate potential slowness issues. 3. **Crashing Programs**: One of the more frustrating issues in IT is program crashes. This module tackles the root causes behind system and application failures, guiding you through the process of analyzing logs and exceptions. You’ll also uncover debugging techniques and the value of effective communication and documentation following incidents, which can promote continuous improvement. 4. **Managing Resources**: Managing applications is crucial to maintaining system integrity. This module discusses memory leaks, disk space management, and network saturation. Beyond technical management, you’ll learn how to prioritize and estimate project timelines effectively, breaking complex problems into manageable chunks. This structured approach not only aids in current troubleshooting but prepares you for future challenges. ### Recommendation I highly recommend the "Troubleshooting and Debugging Techniques" course for both novice and seasoned IT professionals. The structured approach and real-world applications make it a valuable resource. Whether you're looking to refine your debugging skills or expand your troubleshooting toolkit, this course provides practical insights that can be immediately applied in your work environment. ### Conclusion In an era where technology continuously evolves, mastering troubleshooting and debugging becomes increasingly vital. This course on Coursera stands out not just for its comprehensive syllabus but also for its practical approach to real-world issues. By enrolling in this course, you are investing in your professional development and enhancing your abilities to address technical challenges head-on. Don't hesitate — enhance your skills and bolster your confidence in handling IT problems effectively with this excellent course.

Syllabus

Troubleshooting Concepts

In this module, you’ll be introduced to the fundamentals of troubleshooting and you’ll learn different strategies and approaches to tackle problems that you might encounter. You’ll learn about the concept of debugging and how debugging is one of the core principles of troubleshooting. You’ll be introduced to some tools that will help you in the debugging process, like tcpdump, ps, top, itrace, and lots more. Next, you’ll explore how to “understand the problem.” This might sound like a no brainer, but it's not as easy as you might think! Next, we’ll dive into the different approaches when troubleshooting reproducing errors versus intermittent errors. Finally, you’ll learn about “binary searching a problem.” We’ll explore the different types of searches, including binary and linear searches. Then, we’ll learn about the concept of bisecting and how it can be used in your troubleshooting approach, and finish up with finding invalid data in a CSV file.

In this module, you’ll learn about what factors can cause a machine or program to act slowly. You’ll dive into ways of addressing slowness by identifying the bottleneck that might be causing the slowness. You’ll learn about tools to identify which resources are being exhausted, including iotop, iftop, and activity monitor in MacOS. Next, you’ll learn how computers use resources, and understand the differences between CPU, RAM, and cache in order to help you find the possible causes for slowness in our machines or scripts.Next up, you’ll learn how to write efficient code, then explore profilers to help you identify where your code is spending most of its time. Next, you’ll dive into data structures and understand which ones are right for you to use. These include lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets, and expensive loops. Then, you’ll dive into complex slowness problems and how utilizing concurrency and adding a caching service can improve the execution of your code. Finally, you’ll understand how using threads can make the execution of your code much quicker.

In this module, you’ll get introduced to the age old question, “Why has my program crashed?” You’ll learn how to troubleshoot system crashes and application crashes, what tools can be used to help identify the cause of the crash, and what log files to look at in order to find what might have gone wrong. Next, you’ll dive into investigating why code crashes, and what you can do to prevent that from happening. Then, you’ll explore what happens when an unhandled error occurs and throws an exception. You’ll learn about several debugging techniques, which will help you identify these errors and exceptions. Finally, you’ll explore the concept of handling crashes and incidents at a much larger scale. You’ll delve into a scenario where a large eCommerce site will throw an error 20% of the time. Once that issue has been fixed, you’ll understand the importance of communication and documentation during these incidents, and how writing a post mortem can prevent issues from happening again.

In this module, you’ll learn how to manage your applications. You’ll dive into some common issues that may cause your application to crash. You’ll also understand what memory leaks are, and how to troubleshoot and prevent them. Up next, you’ll run down managing disk space; you’ll see some scenarios of how this happens and how to identify what process or application is taking up all your disk space. Then, you'll learn what network saturation is, how it can be caused, and some useful tools and techniques to solve a network saturation problem. Next, we’ll shift from managing applications to managing your time. You’ll get tips on how to prioritize tasks, estimate how long a particular task will take before finishing, and communicate expectations when dealing with important tasks. The final lesson delves into how to deal with hard and complex problems by breaking it down into small, digestible chunks while keeping your eyes on a clear goal. You’ll learn that using proactive approaches, like continuous integration, can help you with future issues that might come up. You’ll also explore how to plan for future resource usage by making good use of monitoring.