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Discussion on: Production-only bugs

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Scott Hannen

That's a really difficult spot to be in. It's easy to go on and on about how to try to prevent that situation (which isn't 100% possible) but that doesn't do any good once you're there.

If you have logging you can look at, that's one way to go. Depending on the code, sometimes half the challenge is figuring out what gets logged and how to access it.

It might help to try to set up similar data in a development environment. Or start with what you know about the data in production that may be different and try to read the code. Neither are ideal, but sometimes there's nothing else we can do.

In these scenarios it's easier if the problem is code. The most frustrating cases I've experienced are when it's something like a firewall rule on a production server and I have no visibility whatsoever. Then I have to get someone else to look at it, but I can only tell them what I think they might be looking for.