Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the only time you see a production box is when it's on fire, I think there's an organizational problem. Occasionally acting as third-line support means real production disasters aren't an unfamiliar zone.
In the "immutable architecture" style, the only time you see a shell on a production box should be when it's on fire (and even then, only if you need to do some "perimortem" debugging because the problem keeps reoccurring even when you just blow the server's state away with a reboot, and nothing in the "postmortem" logs tell you enough to diagnose or even know what more logging you should add.)
At that level, it's the interactions with different components that can break down, and the tools you use are more about testing configured interactions. Also, bad data. That bit necessarily mutates.
I'm a big fan of developing in a similar environment to production, so that the debugging tools and interaction are familiar long before an emergency. At our company, we develop on Linux and deploy on Linux.