The OSI Model: Your Mental Framework for Network Troubleshooting
Introduction: When All Else Fails, Layer by Layer This week, I found myself knee-deep in troubleshooting Grafana Labs telemetry containers that refused to start properly in an OpenShift cluster (loki, mimir, prometheus, tempo, otel collector, spring boot services, etc.). The workloads looked good, the containers were running, but the telemetry data simply wouldn’t flow. Sound familiar? After hours of fruitless searching and even getting blocked by AI assistance (yes, even Claude couldn’t crack it), I realized I was in need of applying long learned principles. That’s when I decided to document the mental framework I developed over years of debugging network issues. ...