Live Webinar
Troubleshooting Digital Experiences Across Owned and Unowned Networks

Industry

The Silence of the LANs (Halloween Special)

By Alex Henthorn-Iwane
| | 5 min read

Summary


Hawk moth from The Silence of the Lambs

Hannibal LANter: I will listen now. You were ten years into your network engineering career. You went to work with colleagues on an app and microservices ranch in Montana. And...?

Clarice Engineerling: [tears begin forming in her eyes] And one morning, I just ran away.

Hannibal LANter: No "just", Clarice. What set you off? You started troubleshooting the application user experience issue at what time?

Clarice Engineerling: Early, still dark.

Hannibal LANter: Then something threw you didn’t it? Something you couldn’t place your finger on?

Clarice Engineerling: I heard a strange noise.

Hannibal LANter: What was it?

Clarice Engineerling: It was... screaming. Some kind of screaming, like a child's voice.

Hannibal LANter: What did you do?

Clarice Engineerling: I went down to the NOC. I crept up into the control center. I was so scared to look at the monitors, but I had to.

Hannibal LANter: And what did you see, Clarice? What did you see?

Clarice Engineerling: LANs. The LANs were screaming.

Hannibal LANter: The NOC staff couldn’t figure out if the user experience issue was due to the LAN or something on the Internet?

Clarice Engineerling: And they were screaming.

Hannibal LANter: And you ran away?

Clarice Engineerling: No. First I tried to solve the problem. I... I looked at all the SNMP and traffic tools and ran as many CLI console commands as I could, but they wouldn't tell me anything conclusive about if the app issue was linked to the LANs. They just stood there, confused. They couldn't help.

Hannibal LANter: But you could and you did, didn't you?

Clarice Engineerling: Yes. I researched Network Intelligence, and found out that with visibility from app to network to device layer and even to BGP, I could save the app and user experience. And I carried that knowledge and ran away as fast as I could to get someone to invest in it..

Hannibal LANter: Where were you going, Clarice?

Clarice Engineerling: I don't know. I didn't have any support, any political cover and it was very cold, very cold. I thought, I thought if I could convince just one person, but... the, the resistance was so heavy. So heavy. I didn't get more than a few miles when the legacy network tools team picked me up. The manager was so angry he sent me to live at the network engineering orphanage in Bozeman. I never saw the app ranch again.

Hannibal LANter: What became of the user experience, Clarice?

Clarice Engineerling: They killed it.

Don’t let this be your app delivery horror story. Check out the Device Layer of ThousandEyes multi-layer visibility and you’ll never again need to listen to the awful screaming of the LANs.

Subscribe to the ThousandEyes Blog

Stay connected with blog updates and outage reports delivered while they're still fresh.

Upgrade your browser to view our website properly.

Please download the latest version of Chrome, Firefox or Microsoft Edge.

More detail