André Lalonde – Support Team Lead
In late November, one of our customers experienced the worst kind of issue: many of their users were no longer able to log in to their environment. After initial troubleshooting left them stumped, they turned to RJR’s Support experts. Fortunately for them, the RJR team assisted them well into the night until their system was back online.
Their testing led them to believe that something had occurred to their SSO (Single Sign-On) environment. We escalated the issue to the software vendor, as is normal for a Severity 1 issue. We needed to wait for the vendor to call us back in order to set up a remote support session between the vendor and our customer.
In the meantime, however, we took our own expertise and applied it to our own troubleshooting. We asked for and received:
- Networking logs to see if the fault lay in a network configuration
- Verified available disk space on all servers in the chain
- Went over the customer’s application and SSO logs to see what could be gleaned from them
- Requested that the customer verify all recent changes with their various IT teams that might impact the issues
Over time, we determined that there was a networking issue affecting the servers. With the customer’s administrator’s investigations, we were eventually able to track things down to an unregistered change: a MAC address for one of the application servers had been copied and spoofed onto a new server, causing several other issues besides this one. After correcting this issue, both our customer and our support team member were able to go home and finally get a good night’s sleep!
If you’re making changes to your organization’s applications or networks, proper change management is essential in order to assist in tracking down the root of issues that may be caused by them. If you’re interested in implementing Change Management in your environment please get in touch with us! We have multiple implementations behind our belts, and we can give you the years of knowledge and best practices necessary to ensure YOUR new Change process slots easily into your organization’s routine!