Every major problem that I have ever solved where I had access to a sample environment, I have solved with this logic. It’s something I found in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where the narrator solves the most mundane problems through these two methods and connects these concepts to those of quantum physics and Zen Buddhism. These are not complex concepts, but all problem-solving can be defined within their parameters.

Induction is recreating the elements that cause the problem in a system to know exactly where the problem has occurred. This is useful in incident management when an incident needs to be recreated in a sample application and then breaking down those steps to find out where it all went wrong.

Deduction is starting at the end and going back to the beginning. This is used when the logic of the error is not recreatable or an incident has occurred already with no idea of how it occurred. In this case, you work back from the end result and figure out what could possibly have caused these results.

So, summarizing these results in a diagram, you can look at them like this:

Figure 13.16 – The steps to solving any IT problem you want

And that is how you solve all of your problems. Try it out on a few of them and see how far you get. If you want to know about the formation of ideas, well, they are quite random, but they can be specified and turned into action points based on methods similar to these. So, now you have learned everything. Use your knowledge wisely.

Summary

Alright, this is the end, not just of the chapter but of the book. The end of your journey as a reader of this book and of mine as a first-time author. It has been quite the journey. Talking about this chapter in general, it was a lot more abstract and a lot less code-focused than a lot of the other chapters, but that is because I’ve come to understand one thing when it comes to all of these systems: everything is code. Everything you touch will have been coded in some way; it is just up to you to understand and manipulate the logic behind it.

In the section regarding Step Functions, you learned about a very useful automation tool, but you also learned that it is a way to use coding logic visually while integrating that way into a lot of powerful tools and services.

In the section on advanced monitoring, we learned about a powerful monitoring and visualization tool in Grafana and the importance of centralized monitoring in preserving your sanity by not having to look through data from multiple locations and then parsing through them, and instead having one location that will work for all your workloads.

Finally, you learned about how I approach problem-solving, an effective method if I do say so myself. I hope you get the chance to use it on your own workloads. This is a sort of meta code, an algorithm that is not beholden to any platform or technology but will work effectively on all of them.

And so, I must bid you adieu. We have come to the end, but look at it only as the end of the beginning, because what happens after is the most important part. This is what will define the person you are and the things that you will do. Now comes the part where you apply all of this knowledge in your own daily dealings. Remember: the power is with you; it is time to use it.