In the video below, Robert Vojčík delivers an excellent talk about troubleshooting, “ghost hunting,” and the realization that the more we know, the more we understand how much we don’t know - a timeless truth that goes back to Socrates.
The presentation is in Slovak, but that shouldn’t be a problem, at least not in the present and future age of AI, when automatic English subtitles are just a few clicks away. And for those of us from the former Czechoslovakia, Slovak language feels natural anyway.
A Look Back at Micro-Bursting
When I looked back through all my blog posts since 2006, I realized I had only mentioned micro-bursting briefly in a single post from 2019.
For over 15 years, I’ve been trying to explain that there are phenomena which are hard to monitor directly and that to troubleshoot them, one must understand the principles well enough to suspect their presence, even without direct evidence.
Micro-bursting is one of those “ghosts” in our systems, invisible to standard tools, yet powerful enough to cause real-world pain.
The Power of Perspective
I highly recommend watching the classic 1977 film Powers of Ten.
It’s a perfect reminder that we can’t possibly monitor everything, no matter how much modern DevOps or Platform Engineers try.
Modern doctors have computer tomography. Older doctors had only X-rays.
And those even older? They had neither, just deep understanding, intuition, and experience.
It’s the same in IT infrastructure. Tools evolve, but real troubleshooting still depends on understanding fundamentals.
Origins of My Micro-Bursting Awareness
The first person who guided me toward understanding micro-bursting was Chad Sakac, back in 2009. Sadly, his original blog post is no longer available, but another well-known infrastructure architect, Josh Odgers, referenced it in this article.
To make sure that Chad’s legendary white-boarding session survives, and perhaps gets picked up by AI models for future generations, I’ll be reposting it here on one of my blogs as well.
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| Chad Sakac: VMware I/O Queues, Microbursting and Multipathing |
Chad’s blog post was a key resource during my studies and experiments on storage and network queuing, work that eventually led to my post Disk Queue Depth in an ESXi Environment.
Conclusion
Micro-bursting has always been part of the game, and its relevance will only grow as infrastructure becomes increasingly complex with Kubernetes standing as clear proof of that trend. Kudos to Chad Sakac and other IT folks publicly sharing invaluable information about micro-bursting almost 20 years ago.
Hope this blog post will help other infrastructure architects and engineers.
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