The Scenario
A new junior IT support technician at a 200-person SA insurer keeps escalating to seniors for issues like "the office Wi-Fi is slow" or "VPN keeps dropping". The IT manager asks you to write a runbook that lets a junior diagnose 80 percent of network issues without escalation.
The Brief
Write a runbook covering five common network issues: slow Wi-Fi, no internet on a single PC, VPN disconnecting, DNS resolution failure, and intermittent packet loss. Each section must show the diagnostic flow from cheapest checks to deeper analysis.
Deliverables
- Five runbook sections, each with: symptoms, prerequisites (what info to gather), tools to use (ping, traceroute, ipconfig, nslookup, Wireshark, vendor portals), step-by-step diagnostic flow, and escalation criteria
- A short reference table of the five most useful command-line tools for network diagnostics with one-line descriptions
- A diagnostic decision tree (text-based) for at least one of the five issues showing branching logic with three or more decision points
- A maintenance plan: what to update in the runbook quarterly and how to harvest new findings from senior engineers
Submission Guidance
Network troubleshooting follows the OSI model. Start at layer 1 (cable, link light), move up through IP, transport, application. Runbooks that jump straight to "open Wireshark" before checking the cable are amateur hour.
Submit Your Work
Your submission is graded against the rubric on the right. If you pass, you get a public Badge URL you can share on LinkedIn. There is no draft save, so work offline first and paste your finished response here.