Top 10 Free System Troubleshooting Tools for SysAdmins

 

 1. Microsoft Fix It Solution Center

The Microsoft Fix It Solution Center is an online tool that helps you to quickly find and fix common system issues. Once you’ve entered the symptoms, you can either download an executable to automatically fix the issue or be directed to a relevant Microsoft Knowledgebase Article that explains what the cause and recommend workaround is.

2. Problem Steps Recorder

Hidden away in Windows 7 / Windows 2008 and above is a neat little utility called Problem Steps Recorder (psr.exe). The Problem Steps Recorder will record the step-by-step interactions that occur while the user replicates the problem, taking screenshots of every action. It then bundles all this into a report with detailed information and any relevant error logs.
This tool is great if you have a user in your environment who is experiencing an issue that you want to gain more information about and the steps they took to reproduce the problem, or if you want to create a report to send to a third party vendor as part of a support case.

3. Reliability Monitor

Windows Vista / 2008 and above include a tool called Reliability Monitor. This tool provides an overview of overall system stability and details about events that can impact reliability. The idea is to pinpoint any troublesome areas and take steps to improve system reliability based on what you learn (e.g. you might identify a trend in a certain application crashing when opening a certain file type)

4. WELT (Windows Error Lookup Tool)

When troubleshooting issues, you may come across Win32, HRESULT, NTSTATUS or STOP error codes which are likely to mean nothing to you or I. Using WELT you can find out what the error code means in plain English and what it relates to.

5. PowerShell Troubleshooting Packs

As I mentioned in my article entitled Windows PowerShell™: Essential Admin Scripts (Part 1) the PowerShell Troubleshooting Packs (bundled with Windows 7/2008 and above) can be really handy when troubleshooting system issues. As such, they are a collection of PowerShell scripts that you can use to diagnose different aspects of your servers, clients or network. Different packages are available to troubleshoot printers, networks, performance, power, Windows Update, etc.

6. WinAudit

As part of the troubleshooting process, it is helpful to know as much information as you can about the machine where the problem resides to assist in finding a solution more quickly. WinAudit scans your computer and gathers a whole raft of information about Installed Software, TCP/IP settings, Drives, Error Logs, etc.
Note: At the time of writing, the download link available from the developer’s website was broken. You can download the latest version of this software from a popular application download site like CNET.

7. Joeware Utilities

Joeware Utilities are a list of free troubleshooting and system information utilities aimed at making the life of an administrator easier. These tools are built by a system administrator from his own experience of not finding a tool out there that did the job he needed for whatever he was trying to solve. The tools available include anything from tools that dump user information from Active Directory, modify a user account’s expiration flag or perform TCP/IP port connection testing.