"On our end, everything looked fine. Health checks were green, traffic patterns were normal, and our application logs showed no sign of trouble. In fact, every request was completed successfully. It was a classic mystery, a ghost in the network. If everything seemed to be working, where were these requests going? Why couldn't we see what the customer was seeing? It was as if the requests were disappearing into a black hole."
"Today, we're going to solve this mystery together. We'll meet the suspects, examine the evidence, and master the tools you'll need for a case like this. I promise that by the end, you'll know how to map the territory, track down elusive bugs, and most importantly, prevent future cases from haunting you. Because there's one thing that I've learned in all my years of debugging, it's that the cloud may be someone else's network, but the detective work, that's all ours."
A major customer reported intermittent, user-facing errors and threatened contract cancellation if unresolved. Users experienced brief spinning followed by an error page with no clear pattern. Internal monitoring showed green health checks, normal traffic, and application logs indicating successful request completion. Requests appeared to vanish unnoticed, suggesting issues outside simple server-side failures. The investigative approach focuses on mapping request flows, inspecting network and client behavior, leveraging tracing and observability tools, and implementing detection and prevention measures to identify elusive, intermittent failures and avoid future customer-impacting incidents.
Read at InfoQ
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