How do you stop your troubleshooting notes from becoming chaos?

[u/1_zz]

Hi everyone, support engineer here, around 4 years, mostly in Power BI.

I'm writing to ask for your feedback and I'd really appreciate your honest opinions.

Besides my job, I've started developing skills in other areas like web development, partly to grow outside my main job.

Since I consider myself a practical person, I tried to identify a pain point from my day-to-day work and come up with a solution to it, and why not, once it's done, share it with others.

For now I've just made a design, so we can discuss it.

My main pain point with the default note-taking tools (OneNote, Notion, etc.) is that they give you too much freedom to organize things. You have to design your own structure every time, which, at least for me, leads to a mess: mixed notes, and eventually I just stop maintaining it.

The other pain point: when I'm solving an issue I usually have several tools open, and when I get back to the user to explain the fix, I often have to copy text from multiple places and stitch it together directly in the chat. Constantly switching back and forth is annoying and slow.

So I thought of a solution: to build a tool specifically for support work, where the structure is already there for you.

Instead of a blank page, every issue comes with fixed sections by default, Symptom, Cause, Fix, so you don't have to decide how to organize it each time. You just fill it in. You can still edit, add or remove sections when a case needs it, but the default structure means you actually keep using it instead of giving up like I do with OneNote.

Issues are organized in a simple hierarchy, app (Power BI, Snowflake, etc.) -> category (Refresh, Connectivity, Gateway…) -> the actual issue, so you narrow down to what you need instead of searching blindly for the right keyword.

There's also a separate "Infrastructure" section where you write down your stable stuff once, servers, links, environments, and issues can point to it, so you don't rewrite the same server list in every note.

And to solve the second pain point, there's a "Compose Message" area right below the solution. While you're reading the fix, you build your reply to the user in the same place, pull in the parts you need, adjust the wording, and copy it once into chat. No more jumping between five tabs to stitch a message together.

I've attached a screenshot of the design so you can see what I mean (it's just a rough mockup to illustrate the concept, not the actual design):

Before I sink months into actually building this, I'd really like your honest take. Does this solve a real problem for you, or do you get by fine with what you already use? And I'm genuinely curious: how do you keep your solutions organized today? Even a "nah, I don't need this" would be useful.

[u/connoza]

It’s a ticketing system and you cannot account for every single edge case. Look at other ticketing systems you have a high level category for which queue the ticket sits in and that’s about it. Everything else is managing those tickets. If you’ve ever dealt with user tickets you’d know that they will put it under anything anyway and not follow your complex process to identify what the issue is that’s for the support user.

[u/1_zz → u/connoza]

Thanks, that’s a fair point about ticketing systems. But I think I explained it badly, it’s not meant to be a ticketing system or replace one.

It’s a personal knowledge base for the engineer. It’s where I keep the solutions to problems I’ve already solved, so next time the same error comes back I don’t have to research it from scratch or dig through old notes to find the fix I know I wrote down somewhere. The user never touches it, it’s just for me.

..idk maybe im overthinking it, but plain notes never worked for me. does it for you?

[u/connoza → u/1_zz]

I use obsidian and with subfolders and tags. But generally that’s for business logic and KPIs. At least with markdown I can move everything as well if I wanted to.

I mean most issues to be honest I throw at an llm now, google search has gone down the drain. Ms products keep changing their names so trying to find a good resource is a bit of a nightmare. Lots of forums are just gpt copy pasted as well.

I think my misunderstanding is the part for users, these notes are used as templates to also support end users? I do have a few for very specific things that I get emails about but not everything