Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One of the most frustrating challenges I faced as a network engineer was troubleshooting problems that had already disappeared. A user would call and report that an application was performing terribly. A site would become unusable for several minutes. Voice calls would break up. File transfers would suddenly slow to a crawl. Then, by the time I started investigating, everything would be working normally again.

I remember the good old days, when troubleshooting application traffic often meant I could examine much of the conversation between a client and server in clear text. Not anymore. Today, nearly everything is encrypted. That is obviously a good thing for security and privacy, but it has also created a common misconception that packet analysis is no longer useful because engineers cannot see the application headers and payload.