Working with the Reliability Monitor - Windows Tutorial

- [Instructor] Sometimes when you are asked to troubleshoot a specific machine in your organization, it's possible that you may not have any real familiarity with that machine. You might not know anything about the history of this machine and what kinds of problems it may have had in the past. It just may be a brand new machine that you've never touched before. So Microsoft does give you a tool which can help you to get a little bit of history behind a machine that you may be asked to work on and that is called the Reliability Monitor. So let's take a look at this. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to click on Start and right up here in search, I'm just going to type in the word reliability. And you'll notice, I didn't even have to type the whole word. And then here you see view reliability history. So let's go ahead and click on that. And that takes me into the Reliability Monitor. Now, you can see that there is a kind of a timeline here and it's viewed by default in days. You could go ahead and you could click and look at it week by week, okay? In this case, it's not going to really matter because this is a fairly newly installed machine that really doesn't have much of a history to it. In fact, there's only really just the one or one or two days here that you can see that anything has been marked. Everything's blank prior to that because, well, the machine wasn't installed prior to that. All right, now let me go ahead. Let's maximize this so we can see more of it, right? It's a little bit easier to see. So basically what it's showing me here is that on this particular day, there is a little blue circle with an exclamation mark in it. That just means that it is information, okay? And you can tell that because over on the right, it says application failures, Windows failures, miscellaneous failures, warnings and information, okay? In that order. And that's what these five boxes are. You'll notice I didn't have any application failures, I didn't have any Windows failures, I didn't have any miscellaneous failures but I do have at least one warning, and there is definitely some informational things that have taken place. All right? And so if you look down in the bottom section, you can see here that it will list the warnings. It tells me that there was an update, I'm going to move the cursor here because when I highlight over it, it's kind of getting in the way, but it says that it failed Windows update. So it's just a warning saying, hey, there was an update that tried to run and it failed. You'll notice that all the informational events also seemed to be related to Windows update. These are all the successful Windows updates. And I can actually scroll down. You'll notice down below all the Windows updates, there's a successful application installation along with, again, some more updates. So this is just all stuff that has happened on this system on this one particular day. Now, if you want to see more detail, I could go ahead and double click on that one particular warning, for instance, and see more of what it says. It gives me the detail, the specific number and name of the update. The problem was that it was a failed Windows update. Says when it happens and the description is installation failure, Windows failed to install the following update, and it gives the name of it again, and that's all we get. Now, in some cases, you might get more detail than that. In this case, it was really kind of redundant, right? It said it in the summary screen, it says it up at the top of the screen, and then it says it again in the description, right? So it's not giving me a whole lot of information but basically this is how you can go ahead and see the history. And again, I apologize that I can't show you a long history 'cause I built a machine just for this course. But in the event that this was a machine that had been running for days, weeks, months, years, you would see a history here and you could look and you could look for the days that maybe had failures that were built in. Additionally, again, really hard for you to really see or get any specific value out of looking at this machine but there is this little thin blue line up at the top here. And that, believe it or not, is actually kind of a chart for how reliable this system has been. If you look all the way over at the left, you'll notice there's a one, a five, and a 10. And the reason for that is because that's what this whole section is is you might see a line going up and down. I mean, what you want to see on a system is you want to see it up at 10 and it's just straight across the top, which is what I have right now, but it's only for one day and that's because it's a newly installed machine. If you were ever to see it going across the top and then you were to see a dip somewhere along the way, well, same place where that dip is that's where you want to look for the failures because that's when the system is telling you, okay, it was less reliable on this day. Why did that happen? Now, I will give you a heads up that sometimes something as simple as installing a Windows update can knock it down from a 10 because it sometimes looks at it as, hey, we installed new updates, we want to know that these updates are not going to cause problems. So it may drop down from a reliability of 10 and then after a few days of no problems with that update, it would bring itself back up again. So that is the Reliability Monitor and you can use that to help see the history of a machine that you may be asked to go and troubleshoot.