Imagine this scenario. It is a Wednesday morning and as the network administrator responsible for servicing business applications, you are processing a series of support tickets that arrived in the past few hours and the previous day. One of the high severity items on your plate this morning is from an application team that has been debugging poor performance of a business critical application. They have received complaints from end users and the line-of-business manager is concerned about potential revenue impacts. The application team has been frantically looking at their logs and haven’t quite pinned down the problem. They now believe it is an issue with the network and want your help finding the source of the problem. By the time the problem has been escalated to you it is already late and they want answers immediately. And just to add to the problem complexity, the issue has been happening sporadically for the last couple of weeks. What do you do?

Cisco Live is a conference that we look forward to attending every year. This event gathers network administrators and networking into one physical network, er, I mean, physical location.  

We were at MesosCon 2016 in Denver couple of weeks ago, and we will be at DockerCon and VelocityConf in Seattle and Santa Clara next week. Aside from bringing together the cognoscenti of container-based microservices, these events are serving a critical need. 

THAT DREADED TROUBLE TICKET:

You get a call Thursday morning from the owner of a high value application in a line of business within your company. The call goes something like this: “Our department’s application was performing very sluggishly yesterday afternoon. End users were complaining about slow page loads and transactions that timed out while waiting for the shopping cart to complete. I think something is wrong with the network infrastructure – please find the problem and fix it ASAP before today's busy hour. Oh, by the way the problem isn’t happening right now.” How would you troubleshoot an intermittent problem like this that happened the previous day?