5 Things I Check First When a Linux Server Goes Down
When a production machine drops offline or stops responding, guessing wastes precious minutes. Here is the exact five-step triage sequence I run to find the root cause and bring systems back online. It was 3:15 AM on a Saturday morning when my phone vibrated with an urgent Prometheus alert. Our primary application server had stopped replying to health check probes. HTTP requests were timing out,…
When a Linux server experiences a sudden failure, it is crucial to follow a systematic approach to identify the root cause and restore service quickly. After receiving an urgent Prometheus alert at 3:15 AM on a Saturday, the author focused on a five-step triage sequence to diagnose and resolve the issue. The first step is to determine network connectivity by pinging the server and testing SSH access.
If these tests indicate network issues, the author checks the network interface status and default route configuration. For resource starvation, the author examines system load averages and memory usage using commands like uptime, free -h, and vmstat 1 5. By following this structured approach, the author avoids the pitfall of blindly rebooting the server, which can cause further damage by erasing vital debugging information.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
