21st Century Tech Support

It was Sunday morning at 8:30am, I had already eaten breakfast and talked myself out of, then back into going snowboarding that day. A friend was coming over at 9 and from there we were going up to Summit County for a day on the slopes. Until my phone buzzed.
It was a text message from one of our executives, she could not send or receive email. I quickly logged on to our Exchange Server. The partition that we write most of our log files to was filling up and both email services and event logging services we stopped dead in their tracks. When I tried to launch the event logging service, I got a cryptic error message, and the email service just would not start.
This kind of stuff is not out of the ordinary for most IT Professionals. What was interesting is that 6 co-workers contacted me regarding the issue. All six contacted me by text message.
I spent the next 5 hours troubleshooting the issue to no avail. Troubleshooting a server without any event logs is a difficult task. After several attempts at resolution, it was time to call in Microsoft. Within an hour, Ajay our Microsoft support rep, had the problems solved and mail was back up and running. I thanked him profusely, and asked him why this problem had occurred. Interestingly, he had no answer. He only did break/fix repairs, root cause analysis was not covered under our level of support. Good thing to remember for next time. My fingers are tightly crossed that their won't be a next time!

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