I don’t work on cosmic problems in my day-to-day work, but I encounter puzzles fairly frequently (what broke? why did performance at node x decrease at time y? why does z work well sometimes but not others?).
Advice I would give:
Get some data. If you have too much data, arbitrarily pick a subset you can handle.
Look for anomalies. Make histograms. Make other graphs. Last weekend I diagnosed a problem with a Windows service with a graph of the Fourier transform of a time series picked out of log files.
what broke? why did performance at node x decrease at time y?
What, broke? Why did spending at node x increase at time y?
It seems that my brain, upon correcting for one grammatical error in a sentence (a missing capitalisation), is more likely to try to correct for other potential grammatical omissions.
I don’t work on cosmic problems in my day-to-day work, but I encounter puzzles fairly frequently (what broke? why did performance at node x decrease at time y? why does z work well sometimes but not others?).
Advice I would give:
Get some data. If you have too much data, arbitrarily pick a subset you can handle.
Look for anomalies. Make histograms. Make other graphs. Last weekend I diagnosed a problem with a Windows service with a graph of the Fourier transform of a time series picked out of log files.
What, broke? Why did spending at node x increase at time y?
It seems that my brain, upon correcting for one grammatical error in a sentence (a missing capitalisation), is more likely to try to correct for other potential grammatical omissions.