Pending, running for eleven hours, or completed with an error nobody read. HOW TO TELL THE THREE APART IN UNDER A MINUTE, WHICH IS THE WHOLE SKILL.
"My request will never finish" is three completely different situations with three completely different fixes, and distinguishing them is the fastest diagnosis in this course.
PENDING MEANS IT HAS NOT STARTED, SO NOTHING IS WRONG WITH THE PROGRAM AT ALL. It is a queue question — Lesson 2's two checks: which manager should run this, and is that manager running with a free process? Investigating the program here is investigating something that has not happened yet.
RUNNING FOR ELEVEN HOURS MEANS IT STARTED AND IS STILL GOING, AND THE FIRST QUESTION IS WHETHER THAT IS NORMAL. Some programs legitimately run for hours. The useful comparison is this request against previous runs of the SAME program — eleven hours against a usual twenty minutes is a finding; eleven against a usual nine is a busy night.
AND IF IT IS ABNORMAL, LOOK AT THE DATABASE SESSION UNDERNEATH IT. Waiting on a lock is a different problem from working hard, and the two look identical from the request list — one needs the blocking session cleared and the other needs patience or tuning.
COMPLETED WITH AN ERROR IS THE ONE THAT WASTES THE MOST TIME, BECAUSE THE USER BELIEVES IT IS STILL RUNNING. It finished, it failed, and nobody looked. The answer is entirely in the log — Lesson 6 — and no amount of investigating managers or capacity helps.
SO THE MINUTE IS SPENT LOOKING AT THE REQUEST'S STATUS AND ITS PHASE, NOTHING ELSE. Those two fields put you in the right one of the three, and everything after that is a different investigation. Nearly every long diagnosis in this area is somebody who started in the wrong one of the three — usually reading a program log for a request that never ran.