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How to troubleshoot

If you are new to troubleshooting network appliances in general, this section outlines some basic skills.

Establishing a system baseline

Before you can define an abnormal operation, you need to know what normal operation is. When there is a problem, a baseline for normal operation helps you to define what is wrong or changed.

Baseline information can include:

If you accidently change something, the backup can help you restore normal operation quickly and easily. Backups also can aid in troubleshooting: you can use a tool such as diff to find the parts of the configuration that have changed.

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Determining the source of the problem

To know which solutions to try, you first need to locate the source of the problem. Occasionally, a problem has more than one possible source. To find a working solution, you will need to determine the exact source of the problem.

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Planning & access privileges

Create a checklist so that you know what you have tried, and what is left to check.

If you need to contact Fortinet Technical Support, it helps to provide a list of what data you gathered and what solutions you tried. This prevents duplicated efforts, and minimizes the time required to resolve your ticket.

If you need access to other networking equipment such as switches, routers, and servers to help you test, contact your network administrator. Fortinet Technical Support will not have access to this other equipment. However, they may need to ask you to adjust a setting on the other equipment.

If you are not using the admin account on FortiWeb, verify that your account has the permissions you need to run all diagnostics.