Practical Guide to Modern Networking Telemetry

Chapter 6. Using Network Telemetry, Combined with Other Layers

It’s true to the point of cliché (Maslow’s “...if the only tool you have is a hammer…”) that our experiences and tools shape our perspectives regarding our approach to solving problems. This is no less true in tech, where we can fall into the trap of hyper-focusing on a single element (as described in Chapter 4), or even a single layer of the application stack—whether that’s the network layer as explored in Chapter 5 or a different one.

The truth is that most real-world issues involve more than one aspect of the application, from code to servers to subsystems like databases or APIs, all the way down to the network. To paraphrase an old New York Telephone ad, “It’s all connected.”

In this chapter, we’ll look at just a few examples of how network telemetry informs and enhances the data provided by platforms more commonly understood to be part of observability solutions. This includes tools and techniques such as tracing, application logging, real user monitoring, and more.

As with Chapters 4 and 5, the goal isn’t to provide an exhaustive list of ways to do full stack observability. The point is that network monitoring (still) matters and matters even in scenarios that are often thought of as application-first or application-centric use cases.

Let’s get to it!

(Meta) Use Case 1: It Doesn’t Work on My Machine

We’re calling this a “meta use case” because it applies to almost everything that follows (and, honestly, to ...