I have worked in IT over twenty years so I have worked on and solved various problems. This problem was a serious issue that illustrates the importance of working with the same environment as the users.

Users using the application were experiencing random crashes. This was causing immense frustration particularly for the users working with the financial records with the financial year end approaching.

It could never be reproduced in a support environment and some people held the view that the problem didn’t exist.

Enormous amounts of time were spent analysing logs, gathering steps and discussing the situation.

I organised for a specialist configuration to be setup and selected users were asked to use it. After a couple of weeks a user experienced the crash and the configuration delivered a dump file which gave a critical clue to the investigation.

The user’s environment was significantly different from the support team’s environment and the environment had a critical add-on that the support team didn’t have. The support team would never have reproduced the issue because their PCs didn’t have the add-on.

When the add-on supplier analysed the dump it revealed that a resource leak that caused it to crash intermittently. The crashes had absolutely nothing to do with what the user was doing, or even what the application.

This blog series

This article is one of a series of articles to help system administrators understand the Maximo logs and the underlying architecture.

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The postings on this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent Vetasi's positions, strategies or opinions.

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