Working with the Reliability Monitor - Windows Tutorial

- [Instructor] One of the big lessons that I've learned over the years is that most of the time when you're troubleshooting a problem with Windows, you're not troubleshooting that problem on your own PC. Typically, you do the troubleshooting work on somebody else's system, that someone else might be an end user in your organization, it might be a friend, it could even be a family member. But the reason why this matters is because if you're troubleshooting a problem on somebody else's system, then you're not necessarily familiar with that system's history. What this means is that you don't necessarily know what problems may have occurred in the past, what's been done to fix those problems, or how long the current issue has been going on. So that's where a tool called the Reliability Monitor comes into play. The Reliability Monitor shows you how reliable the system has been over a period of time, and it also shows you critical events that may have occurred. So let's take a look at this tool. I'm going to begin by Right Clicking on the start button. I'll click run, I'll type control and click OK, and that opens the legacy control panel. Next, I'm going to click on system and security. I'll click on security and maintenance. Then I'm going to expand the maintenance section and click view reliability history. And this opens the Reliability Monitor. As you can see, the main component to the Reliability Monitor is this chart that you see at the top of the screen. And this chart reflects a system that is considered to be very reliable. If you look closely at the chart, you'll notice a blue line just above my mouse pointer, and that blue line is exactly where we want to see it, right at the top of the chart. That indicates that this system is considered to be very reliable. And in case you're wondering why we don't have a blue line on this half of the chart, it's because the system was powered off for an extended period of time so there's no reliability data for that time when the system was turned off. But you'll notice that this line is straight and consistent, meaning that the reliability has not changed over this period of time. So what would we see if the system weren't reliable? Well, let's find out. What I'm going to do is close the Reliability Monitor, and I'm going to intentionally crash this system. So obviously, this part is not something that you should do on your own system. So what I'm going to do is click on the start button. From there, I'll click on all apps. I'll scroll down. I'll click on Windows Tools. Then I'm going to Right Click on the command prompt, and I'll click run as administrator. I'll click yes, and this opens an elevated command prompt window. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to shut down a critical process, and that's going to cause this machine to generate a blue screen of death error. So I'll type taskkill, and again, don't do this on your own machine Space /IM Space svchost.exe, and then Space /f to force the shutdown of this process. I'll press Enter, and we have a blue screen of death error. So I'm going to pause the video while the system reboots. And the system has rebooted, so let's go back to the Reliability Monitor. So again, I'm going to Right Click on the start button. I'll go to run, type control and click OK. I'll click on system and security. Security and maintenance. I'll expand the maintenance section and click view reliability history. And so now the line hasn't moved yet, but you'll notice that we have all of these icons right here, indicating that there's been a lot of activity for the day. So what do these icons mean? Well, if you see a blue icon like this one right here, that's informational. So if I click on this particular day, you can see that there were three informational events and these were simply updates. If I click on the day before that, we have a blue icon and then we have a yellow warning icon. So we have several informational events, and then we also have a warning message right here indicating that there was a Windows Update that failed. Now what about today? I'll go ahead and click on today. And so for today, we have an informational event, which was a successful Windows Update. We have a warning, which was a failed Windows Update. And then we have all of these critical events that were caused by what I just did. So we can see that Windows shut down unexpectedly. Windows was not properly shut down. And Windows stopped working. So all of these events were tied to the same action, that was the action of me killing that critical process. But these types of actions affected the system's overall reliability. Now granted the chart doesn't show that change in reliability, but if I were to come back here tomorrow, you would likely see that chart take a big dip because the reliability has changed. So, and as a matter of fact, I'm going to pause the video. I'm going to wait a couple of days and I'm going to come back and show you just how the system's reliability has changed. Okay, so several days have passed and I've actually been out of town, so I haven't even touched this machine. Let's go ahead and take a look and see how the reliability has changed over time. So I'm going to begin by Right Clicking on the start button. I'll go to run, type control, click OK. Then I'll click on system and security. I'll click on security and maintenance. I'll expand the maintenance section and view the reliability history. And so here, if you take a look, you can see on Friday where I caused that blue screen of death and the reliability dropped way off. Now you'll notice that the blue line gradually trends upward. And the reason for that is that we had something bad happen on this day, the blue screen of death that I caused, but there haven't been any problems since that time. So the system is gradually proving itself to be increasingly reliable over time. That's why you can see this blue line gradually trending upward, although it's yet to reach the same level that it was before the crash that I caused. So that's how the Reliability Monitor works in Windows 11.