Cloud & AI Troubleshooting Playbook

When something breaks, start with the symptom, not the service name.

A practical troubleshooting loop

1. Define the symptom — What is failing, for whom, and since when?
2. Check scope — One request, one workload, one availability zone, one region, or everything?
3. Check recent changes — Deployments, configuration, IAM, networking, certificates, dependencies, or model changes.
4. Check the dependency chain — DNS → network → identity → compute → storage/database → application → external service.
5. Use evidence — Logs, metrics, traces, health checks, audit events, and error messages.
6. Test the smallest hypothesis — Change one variable at a time where possible.
7. Mitigate first, investigate second — Restore service safely, then identify the root cause.
8. Document the fix — Record the symptom, root cause, resolution, and prevention step.

Questions to ask yourself

• Is the problem availability, performance, correctness, security, or cost?
• Is it new or recurring?
• Did the failure begin after a deployment or configuration change?
• What does the monitoring data prove rather than suggest?
• What is the safest reversible action?

Use this playbook as the entry point, then connect it to the relevant cloud concepts, platform documentation, and service-specific guides.