How to determine the severity of network problems

- [Instructor] Network severity triage is all about making sure we handle network issues in the proper order. The Nielsen Group tells us that in order to triage any type of network severity, we need to review the following ways. The first is the frequency with which the problem occurs. Is this a common issue or is it rare? The impact of the problem. Once you find out the frequency, then you can see what the impact is. Will it be easy or difficult for the users to overcome? And also the persistence of the problem. Is it a one-time problem that users can overcome once they know about it, or will users repeatedly be bothered by the problem? Many times we're going to need to get others involved. Understanding the severity of a network problem should not be up to a single person. The accounting team may find something more severe than the HR team. Therefore, it's important to have a notification system in place so severity can be determined. The IT team may have a narrow view of what's important to an organization, so they may think that the email server is more important than the accounting server, but the owners of a company might feel differently about that. When you gather the stakeholders, which includes department heads, owners, critical contractors, and others during an outage, it's more likely the proper list of importance will begin to take shape. So what are the most common networking issues? Here are six very common networking issues that happen in pretty much every networking environment. The first would be a malware outbreak on hosts. Network viruses can completely disable a computer network, so this really should be the first and most important issue that we should take a look at. There can be a lot of different causes for computer viruses, such as email attachments, malicious software, a lot of different online advertisements, and even social media. Another could be the lack of access that could be limited to a single user, or a small group, or everyone. It's important to find out immediately how many people are affected to determine if this is an emergency or just a one-off user issue. Wireless can play an ever increasing role in an organization's networking and networking problems. The bandwidth for wireless is very narrow and easily stepped on by other devices. A centralized wireless management system is the best way to see the severity of a Wi-Fi issue quickly and efficiently through. Network slowness is more common and more frustrating than a network outage can be because at first there's no way to find the issue. DNS is usually the culprit and needs to be the first thing to be looked at. Without name resolution, it doesn't matter if you're connected or not, there is no access to resources. Another issue can arise when network planning and management go off course when it comes to how many different IP addresses an organization needs. Each user needs to have at least a single IP address, but now the average user requires up to five or even 10 addresses when you add in VoIP phones, tablets, cell phones, computers, and more. And internet of things will further add to this issue as more devices come online. Remote access can be a real hassle, VPNs can be blocked based on their usable protocols at restaurants and hotels among other locations. Your job will be to determine if the issue is on the organization side or the source network as being the issue keeping the user from connecting. Understanding the issues that cause a network problem is not the first thing you need to do. The impact and severity of a problem with input from stakeholders should be the first priority when determining how to proceed with mitigating a network outage.