Troubleshooting and Debugging Techniques

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 you 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 the printf debugging technique, 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.