After receiving a problem report you talk to the users and figure out exactly what symptoms they are having. What is the next question you should ask yourself and your IT team?

• A. What is the current status
• B. Who reported the issue
• C. What was the last thing that changed
• D. What is the expected impact

Answer: (C)

When investigating a problem after you’ve gathered users’ symptoms, the next move is to identify the last thing that changed in the environment. Changes—deployments, configuration updates, patches, or infrastructure tweaks—are a common source of new issues. By pinpointing the most recent change, you can check change logs, assess whether that change could have caused the symptoms, and quickly test by rolling back or adjusting the change. This approach helps you form a concrete hypothesis about the root cause and guides the next troubleshooting steps.

Knowing who reported the issue doesn’t reveal causation, and the current status or the expected impact are helpful for coordination and prioritization but don’t pinpoint what caused the problem.