IT Consulting, Managed Solutions Posted on 2/6/2009 8:07 AM | Comments (0)

Today, a new customer came to RMSource for some help... A long running problem was crippling the performance of their legacy and modern applications. For almost a year their internal teams had chased the issue but found no root cause. So many possibilities had been suggested and modifications tried that troubleshooting had completely overwhelmed them. We were able to come in with a fresh set of eyes and no predisposition to take a pervasive look into the infrastructure. Everything looked great from the surface... best in breed network and server equipment all less than 2 years old, but after so much troubleshooting components were left in disarray. We found many small problems but no smoking gun... Finally after peeling back the onion we found it! It was a single line of configuration in the firewall.

After putting that in context with all our other discoveries it looks like the mistake was made at initial implementation. A flaw in the baseline of any infrastructure can be almost make success impossible!