Users complain that queries against the company's production SQL Server cluster are much slower than usual this morning. Reports show the slowdown began shortly after last night's maintenance window, when the storage team expanded the SAN LUN that holds the cluster's data files and the Windows team applied cumulative OS patches to both nodes. You have just begun the troubleshooting process.
Which first question to the relevant stakeholders would BEST help you determine the scope of the problem?
Can someone provide the 24-hour growth trend for tempdb so we can compare it to yesterday's baseline?
Have we already run DBCC CHECKDB to verify the integrity of every database on the cluster?
Should we immediately fail over the SQL cluster to the secondary node to see if that restores normal performance?
What exact changes were made during the SAN LUN expansion-including size, pathing or zoning adjustments-and at what time did the work complete?
The first step in the CompTIA troubleshooting methodology is to identify the problem and its scope by questioning users or stakeholders and determining what changed. Asking for precise details about the SAN LUN expansion (what was changed, when it finished, and whether any pathing or zoning parameters were altered) directly targets the recent environmental change most likely to have affected multiple servers simultaneously. Gathering that information establishes whether the storage modification could explain the widespread SQL slowdown.
The other options either dive into database-level checks, request performance metrics, or suggest dramatic corrective action before the nature and scope of the issue are understood, so they are not the best initial questions.
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What is a SAN LUN and why might changes to it impact SQL Server performance?
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What does DBCC CHECKDB do, and why was it mentioned as a follow-up step?
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What is tempdb, and why compare its growth trends to address performance issues?