When a transaction fails, network root cause analysis should already be waiting on the incident.
“Network’s green. Must be the app.”
If you have ever been on an incident bridge, you know how this goes. Checkout is failing. Customers are furious. The app team confirms users are hurting and pages the network team. The network team opens their console, sees a wall of green, and says, “Not us.”
Then everyone spends the first part of the incident arguing about whose problem it is. Nobody is fixing anything yet. They are negotiating.
I have been on both sides of that call, and here is the frustrating part: the network team usually isn’t wrong about what they see. The dashboards really are green. The cause is just small and quiet. A marginal cable. A VLAN tagging fault. A configuration change nobody flagged. A firewall that came back after a power event with the wrong settings.
The answer was in the network data the whole time. Nothing connected it to the transaction that failed.
Meanwhile, the help desk saw the ticket first, but couldn’t rule the network in or out, so the incident escalated by default, the way they all do. And if the problem is intermittent, the evidence can be gone before anyone thinks to look. Then you wait for it to happen again.
Users don’t care whose fault it is. Neither do the AI agents now running workflows across your systems. They care that it works.
Know first, then know why
That’s why I’m excited to announce our new technology partnership with PathSolutions. It connects Apica Vanguard synthetic monitoring with PathSolutions TotalView network root-cause analysis, so the application answer and the network answer land on the same incident.
Apica’s job is to know first and know what to do. Vanguard runs always-on synthetic checks from global vantage points, testing multi-step transactions, APIs, authentication flows and the tool calls AI agents make. It doesn’t wait for a user to complain. The moment a transaction fails, we know.
But knowing it failed isn’t knowing why. That’s where Tim Titus, PathSolutions’ founder and CTO, comes in. TotalView watches switches, routers, gateways, firewalls and their interfaces through SNMP, syslog and NetFlow. It correlates 19 interface error counters plus QoS, PoE, configuration and traffic data, then tells you in plain English what’s wrong and how to fix it. As Tim likes to say, monitoring shows symptoms. TotalView explains causes.
Here’s how the two work together:
- Detect. A Vanguard check catches a failed or slow transaction, often before any user reports it.
- Isolate. Vanguard shows whether the failure is app-wide or limited to one location or network path.
- Inspect. Vanguard identifies the source and destination IP addresses of the failing workflow and directs TotalView to inspect that exact path. The handoff happens only on failure, so there’s no constant polling load.
- Diagnose. TotalView’s heuristics engine pinpoints the cause, such as bad cable, port five, and recommends corrective action.
- Correlate. Vanguard’s check analytics engine puts the application results and the network diagnosis on one incident and routes it to your ITSM or incident response tool, such as ServiceNow or PagerDuty.
You rule the app in or out, and the network in or out, in one incident. No bridge call required.
Why this matters: The cost of the argument
Most conversations about incidents focus on the cost of the outage. I want to talk about the cost of the argument. Every network-caused incident pays the same triage tax: Senior engineers on both sides spending the opening stretch proving it isn’t their fault before anyone starts fixing it. Here’s what changes when that tax goes away.
- No more finger-pointing. One correlated incident and one timeline, not two consoles and a war room.
- Tier-1 can resolve, not just escalate. With a plain-English diagnosis attached to the failed check, your help desk can fix the problem or route it to the right team the first time. For a CIO watching labor costs, that’s a staffing story, not just an uptime story.
- Your data stays home. TotalView runs network analysis on-premises, and the integration shares a diagnosis, not raw telemetry. That matters for CISOs and anyone in a regulated industry.
- No rip-and-replace. Network teams keep working in TotalView. SREs keep working in Vanguard. Customers of either company can add the other without replacing anything.
- Ready for AI agents. As more workflows run through agents, a failed tool call needs the same treatment as a failed checkout. Now you can trace it to the network hop that caused it.
And for those intermittent problems that vanish while everyone debates? The network answer is captured the moment the check fails, before the first person even looks.
See it live on Dec. 7
Tim and I recorded a short video about this partnership, and yes, we spend the first ten seconds blaming each other. Old habits.
The point is that we don’t have to anymore. Apica tells you something’s wrong the moment it happens. PathSolutions tells you why. Together, teams get from “something’s broken” to “here’s the fix” without the bridge call.
Join us on Dec. 7, 2026, for a joint webinar where we’ll walk through the rule-in, rule-out workflow live. Register by visiting this link.
It’s never the network. Until it is. Now you’ll know which.
