Question

You have been given a stipend to expand your “troubleshooting tool kit” by adding three additional utility software tools to aid in your work.

After researching your options, which tools would you choose?

In your response, name and describe three specific utility software tools not described in the textbook that you believe would most improve your ability to render general, but effective, user support.

If possible, choose tools from at least two of the categories described in the “Categories of Utility Software Tools” section of the text.

Categories of Support Utilities

• Hardware Support

• System Information

• Software Support—Operating Systems

• Software Support—Applications

• System Problem Diagnosis

• Network Support

• Internet Support

• File Management Tasks

• Performance Enhancements

• Security Solutions

• User Support Tools

Then, explain why each of the tools you’ve selected would be a helpful addition to your on-the-job tool kit.

Answer 1

From the above section, two most important section for an infrastructure level are the network and the operating system. Here are few tools that can be used for network category:

• Wireshark: This is the most powerful tool in the field of network as this tool is capable of capturing the packets that are moving in and out of the network. Through Wireshark, we can easily troubleshoot issues related to network threats by analyzing the captured traffic.
• Nagios: This is basically an infrastructure level monitoring tool that mostly gives the health of all the servers and even health of load balancer. This monitoring tool even provides network level criticality as well.
• Ping: This is the most common network troubleshooting tool where the connectivity is being checked through this tool. This tools helps in troubleshooting connectivity issues.

Operating system level tools:

• Top: This is a utility which helps in checking the cpu utilisation, disk and memory utilization of an operating system. Top tool is very much important in troubleshooting OS issues.
• iotop: this is also an OS troubleshooting tool that actually describes the input output operation happening on the OS level.
• Microsoft event viewer: This is a special tool specially designed for the Microsoft OS as it provides the details of events that has taken place on that machine. This actually helps in troubleshooting the OS as per the events logged in that machine.