Every IT person has lived this outage: the app is down, the database team says the database is fine, the network team says the network is fine, and infrastructure team says the DCs are fine. Everyone is right, and the app is still down. The problem is in the seam between us. My goal is to bridge that gap. Not only for myself, but to show others out there that from the DBA’s chair, the network, infrastructure, and the database don’t have to be such completely separate knowledge domains where one is a black box to the other.
To blame the network, you must understand the network.
Okay, that’s not true at all. But still, it’s a good idea to know this stuff.