Clock skew quietly ruins network postmortems
Misaligned timestamps across collectors turn a clean path story into competing timelines nobody trusts.
After a brownout, teams often argue about order: did the route flap precede the application timeout, or the reverse? Application analytics and network exporters that disagree on time make that argument endless. Before you invest in prettier correlation boards, audit NTP sources, collector lag, and how timestamps are stored.
Require a single reference clock policy for path events. Document which systems write wall time versus monotonic offsets. When reconstructing an incident, normalise exports before storytelling.
Clean clocks make modest timelines more useful than ornate graphs drawn from mismatched seconds.