Troubleshooting Environmental Issues

The fact that you are following this article should mean that you have established root cause and have eliminated the problem you are experiencing as a Known Issue, or being covered in a Knowledge Base Article – Please see for guidance on establishing root cause.

There is no exact methodology on how to approach your troubleshooting environmental issue a lot will depend on consistency\regularity of the problem; intermittent problems are often the most difficult to get to the bottom of – Here are some general tips:

Establish the Facts

Build in processes to identify when the problem has occurred – this could be as simple as checking a record straight after it has been raised or maybe creating a report that will identify affected records.

Keep a log of occurrences of the problem – get the users to capture as much information as possible to identify if there is any pattern or common denominators to when the problem occurs.

Turn on debug logging – Look for any errors around the time of the issue occuring. For further information on the log files click here.

Ruling out the usual suspects

Eliminate Bespoke – This article gives information on getting Sage 200 to temporarily ignore custom tables.  It is possible as a quick test to rule in bespoke by following the steps outlined in this article. However, to only way to rule out bespoke is to remove it (if the problem is intermittent the customisations may need to be disabled for a reasonable period of time i.e. if the issue occurs at least once a day then the add-on would need to be switched off for a day.

Eliminate the influence of 3^rd Party Apps including but not limited to Security software (antivirus/firewall), consider running in Safe Mode with Networking or using MSConfig to switch off everything except essential windows services.

Access rights, Network and peripheral application settings (Group Policy, DEP, UAC, Network\Domain configuration, Folder Redirection (UPD)), SQL (collation, compatibility level, memory allocation), IE (advanced security), IIS (certification, authorisation).

Drilling down to determine the root of the problem

If the problem is network wide Try and recreate in a copy of the data in test company onsite – this may involve a certain level of spamming of the affected process\areas but if this proves fruitful it will give you a better chance of identifying the cause (as it may allow you to utilise tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Profiler).

If the problem is only affecting certain PCs on a network compare identify what the affected PCs have in common and what make them different to none affected machines (software such as Belarc Advisor can be used to quickly identify these differences). 

If the problem is only affecting certain users, compare the users profile to working users, consider rebuilding users profiles or creating test profiles. Run a SFC /SCANNOW via CMD

Useful Tools

Event viewer can provide additional information when an application closes unexpectedly, see this article for further information.

Process monitor monitors real-time file system, registry and process/thread activity, it can be a very useful tool for troubleshooting application crashes but it is especially useful when an application hangs without response – See  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon for further information.

Wire shark is a network protocol analyser, see https://www.wireshark.org/ for further information.

Fiddler is a web debugging proxy, see https://www.telerik.com/videos/fiddler/getting-started-with-fiddler-web-debugging-proxy for further information.

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