When charts blame the circuit before anyone checks the session
The ticket usually arrives with a screenshot. A latency spike lines up with a campus site, and the first conclusion writes itself: the managed link must be the culprit. By the time connectivity engineers open their own tools, the narrative has already hardened in Slack.
We ask for three artefacts before anyone redraws the timeline: the raw application event window with consistent timestamps, the site or edge label that was actually attached to those sessions, and the deploy or config change list for the same hours. Missing any of those three is enough to invent a cliff that never happened on the wire.
In one recent Hung Hom review, the “circuit outage” turned out to be a mobile release that dropped session identifiers on a subset of users. Connectivity markers were quiet because nothing on the path had failed. The lesson was not that charts are useless—it was that attribution needs continuity before drama.
If your team keeps arguing about which side of the handoff is broken, start with a Path Clarity Review on one journey. Prove what you can measure today, then decide whether the next spend belongs in instrumentation or in the overlay.