Opening Scenario
Your service starts returning timeouts sporadically. The errors appear in logs, but no exception is thrown in your application code. You can hit the endpoint fine from your laptop. A colleague in a different region sees it constantly. You have no idea where the problem lives — is it DNS? The network? The upstream service? The load balancer?
Before you can fix anything, you need to locate the failure. That requires a toolkit.
Question Progression
1. Where is the failure?
Question: When a request times out, how do you determine whether the problem is in your code, the network between you and the server, or the server itself?
Reasoning: A timeout means the connection didn't complete within the expected window — but it doesn't tell you where in the journey it stalled. Your app code might have a slow database call. The network might be dropping packets. The server might…
In the full tutorial
- When to Reach for This