When infrastructure events disagree on the clock
Clock skew and mixed timezones turn a clean event trail into contradictory timelines. Here is how we check alignment before trusting any reconstruction.
Infrastructure event tracking fails quietly when producers stamp time in different zones or drift from NTP. A failover can look like it finished before it started.
We start every intake map by sampling raw timestamps against a shared reference window. If skew exceeds the window you use for correlation, we treat that as a first-class gap — not a footnote.
Teams that fix clocks early spend less time arguing about order in the postmortem room.