When a production machine drops offline or stops responding, guessing wastes precious minutes. Here is the exact five-step triage sequence I run to find the root cause and bring systems back online. It was 3:15 AM on a Saturday morning when my phone vibrated with an urgent Prometheus alert.
Source: [Dev.to](https://dev.to/asepsayyad007/5-things-i-check-first-when-a-linux-server-goes-down-3e0i)