Network Observability for Cloud Outages: What To Monitor to Detect Provider Failures Faster

Stop Waiting for Users to Complain: Detect Cloud & Provider Outages Faster

When a CDN POP blips, DNS answers slowly or BGP paths flap, your first notification shouldn’t be a flood of support tickets. Teams that detect provider-side outages quickly reduce downtime, limit revenue loss and keep regulatory obligations (like UK GDPR availability expectations) intact. This article gives UK IT leaders and platform engineers a practical observability playbook for 2026: the exact metrics, dashboards and alerting you need to spot provider failures — before users panic.

Why provider outages still blindside ops in 2026

2025–2026 saw an uptick in large-scale provider incidents: major CDN, cloud and telco outages made headlines and highlighted a recurring theme — visibility gaps. Multiple causes contributed: software regressions at scale, misconfigurations, control-plane failures, and emergent routing problems as edge and multi-cloud footprints expand.

Two trends matter for observability strategy:

• Edge & multi-CDN complexity — Apps now run across multiple POPs, clouds and edge runtimes, increasing failure surface area. Teams building & monitoring edge-first apps should review patterns in edge-powered PWAs.
• BGP & routing risk still real — RPKI adoption improved in 2025 but route leaks and accidental announcements remain a top source of widespread outages. See operator playbooks and horizon scanning in the future data fabric discussions for how routing anomalies propagate across fabrics.

Top-level detection goals (what success looks like)

• Detect provider-side impairments within 60–120 seconds of onset.
• Reduce MTTD (mean time to detect) relative to user-reported incidents by 70%.
• Provide confident evidence that an issue is provider-side vs application-side for incident escalation.

Four signal families that catch provider outages early

To detect provider failures early, instrument and correlate signals across these families. Each family is necessary but not sufficient; the power is in correlation.

1) DNS monitoring — DNS latency, SERVFAIL/SERVERROR spikes, and resolver behaviour

Why: DNS failures or slow resolution are the fastest way to impact many services simultaneously. Provider issues often show first in DNS: zone propagation delays, authoritative name server outages or upstream resolver problems.

• Key metrics: DNS query latency (median/95/99), rcode distribution (NOERROR, SERVFAIL, NXDOMAIN), probe_success rates from multiple resolvers.
• Sources: synthetic probes (Prometheus Blackbox exporter), managed DNS provider telemetry, recursive resolver logs, RUM DNS timings. If you’re standardising probes and dashboards, the tool rationalization approach reduces noise and duplication.

Recommended thresholds (starting points):

• Alert warn if 95th percentile DNS lookup latency > 150 ms across probes for >2 minutes.
• Alert critical if SERVFAIL rate > 1% of queries > 1 minute or probe_success drops below 95%.

# Prometheus blackbox: 95th percentile DNS latency
histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(probe_dns_lookup_time_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le, job))

# Simple success rate
( sum(rate(probe_success[5m])) by (job) / count_over_time(probe_success[5m]) )

2) Origin reachability and TLS/TCP health

Why: When a CDN or edge layer fails to contact your origin, user-facing errors spike. Origin reachability sensors tell you whether the problem is between the CDN and your origin, inside your origin, or within the provider network.

• Key metrics: TCP connect time, TLS handshake time, TCP resets, HTTP 5xx from edge to origin, origin response time and connection failures.
• Sources: synthetic HTTP/TCP probes from multiple POPs, CDN origin-health webhooks, origin access logs, packet captures when necessary. For programmable edge stacks, add synthetic tests as you would for micro-apps shown in the micro-apps DevOps playbook.

Alert thresholds:

• Warn: 5xx rate from edge > 2% for 5 minutes.
• Critical: sustained TCP connect failures between CDN and origin > 0.5% across POPs for 2 minutes.

# Example PromQL: origin 5xx rate measured at edge
sum(rate(origin_http_responses_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])) by (pop)

# TLS handshake time 95th percentile
histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(probe_tls_handshake_time_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le, pop))

3) CDN health metrics — POP availability, cache behaviour, purge and control-plane errors

Why: Modern outages often occur in a CDN's control plane (invalidations, API failures) or in specific POPs. Tracking CDN-specific telemetry reduces noise and helps distinguish local vs global problems.

• Key metrics: POP availability (per-POP latency/error), cache hit ratio and sudden cache-miss spikes, purge latency, control-plane API error rate, edge 5xx counts and origin failover events.
• Sources: CDN provider metrics (where available), RUM, edge logs, synthetic edge probes from multiple geographies and networks.

Practical checks:

• Watch per-POP 95th percentile HTTP latency and 5xx. If a single POP shows 5xx > 1% but global remains low, you may be seeing a local POP degradation.
• Monitor control-plane API 4xx/5xx rates — control-plane failures often precede widespread disruptions (e.g. failed configuration pushes). These control-plane signals are increasingly important for programmable edge and multi-CDN patterns covered in future data fabric analyses.

4) BGP anomalies — prefix withdrawals, unexpected origin AS, and RPKI validation changes

Why: BGP incidents cause instant, widespread reachability issues. Detecting anomalies in routing announcements gives you the fastest signal for telco/provider-level outages and hijacks.

• Key signals: sudden spike in withdrawn prefixes, mass route flaps, new unexpected origin AS for your prefixes, RPKI ROA invalidations, AS path changes for critical prefixes.
• Sources: BGP collectors (BGPStream, RIPE RIS, Routeviews), RPKI/RTR feeds, public looking glasses, your provider’s route-monitoring hooks.

Monitoring checklist:

• Alert on any origin AS change for your /24s, /23s or other critical prefixes.
• Alert on a sustained increase (>x3 baseline) in route withdraws for your upstreams for more than 60 seconds.
• Integrate RPKI status; alert if ROA validity flips to INVALID.

# Example: use BGPStream or MRT collector to detect origin AS changes (pseudocode)
# When origin_as(prefix) != expected_as => generate alert

# Use pybgpstream or an existing SaaS to push events into your observability pipeline

Dashboard design: what to put on the incident War Room panel

Design dashboards to present high signal-to-noise and enable fast triage. Build a single "Provider Outage War Room" dashboard with these sections:

1. Global Health Summary — single-line status scores: DNS health, CDN health, BGP state, origin reachability, user 5xx rate. Use red/yellow/green tiles.
2. DNS Detail — per-resolver latency percentiles, SERVFAIL rate, probes by region (graph + map).
3. CDN & Edge — per-POP 95th latency, edge 5xx trend, cache-hit ratio heatmap, control-plane API error rate.
4. Origin Reachability — probe TLS/TCP connect histogram, origin 5xx rate from edge, network traceroute snapshots.
5. BGP & Routing — recent withdrawals, unforeseen origin AS events, RPKI validation status, visualization of affected prefixes on a world map.
6. Timeline & Correlation — an event timeline showing ticket creation, status-page notices, provider API errors, DNS anomalies and BGP events, aligned to the same time axis.

Make each tile clickable to the relevant detailed panel or log search. Use Grafana or any observability UI that supports annotations so you can overlay provider status page updates on top of metric graphs. If you’re managing multiple monitoring tools, follow the tool rationalization guidance to keep your War Room concise.

Alerting strategy: reduce noise, preserve urgency

Not every blip is an incident. Use multi-dimensional alerts and a severity ladder:

• Info — single-probe transient anomaly (automatically ticketed to SRE queue).
• Warning — sustained anomaly across 2+ independent probes or increased control-plane errors (Slack + email to on-call, auto-create incident).
• Critical — correlated signals across DNS, CDN and BGP or user-impacting 5xx spike (page refresh), trigger paging/escalation, update status page template.

Example condensed alert rule (Prometheus pseudo-alert):

ALERT Provider_DNS_Degradation
  IF increase(dns_servfail_total[2m]) > 0 OR histogram_quantile(0.95, rate(probe_dns_lookup_time_seconds_bucket[5m])) > 0.15
  FOR 2m
  LABELS { severity="warning" }
  ANNOTATIONS { summary = "DNS degradation observed: check authoritative and resolver chains." }

Correlate alerts via an incident platform (PagerDuty, xMatters) and use runbooks that list the minimal evidence required to escalate to providers: time-stamped graphs, traceroutes, RPKI statuses, and relevant edge logs. For playbooks and runbook automation patterns, teams are increasingly referencing best-practice templates similar to those used for building micro-apps and edge services in the micro-apps DevOps playbook.

Triage playbook — step-by-step when an alert fires

1. Confirm multi-source evidence: check synthetic probes from at least two distinct networks (ISP, cloud region) and RUM if available.
2. Quickly classify: DNS, CDN/edge, origin, BGP/routing or client-side. Use the War Room dashboard to correlate.
3. If DNS: query authoritative servers directly; check zone operations, TTLs, and provider status pages.
4. If CDN/edge: check POP-level patterns, control-plane API errors and origin-to-edge errors. Use CDN provider diagnostics or their status API.
5. If BGP: validate via multiple collectors and check RPKI status. Execute looking-glass traces from several IXPs and upstreams.
6. Confirm whether automatic failover or mitigations are working (e.g., backup CDN, different DNS failover, cached content). If not, apply pre-approved mitigations and record actions in incident timeline. For automation and failover scripts, teams often borrow patterns from the micro-apps automation sections.
7. Communicate: update internal incident channels, customer status page, and log vendor ticket with collected evidence (graphs, traceroutes, timestamps).

Sample incident evidence bundle for vendors

When contacting a provider, attach concise, time-stamped evidence:

• Short summary & impact window (UTC), services affected.
• DNS probe graphs and qps/rcode snapshot for affected domains.
• Traceroutes/MTRs from 2–3 different vantage points showing degradation.
• BGP announcements/withdrawals and RPKI validity for the affected prefixes.
• Edge logs or CDN origin 5xx trends showing origin vs edge patterns.

Integrations & tooling — practical stack for 2026

Recommended building blocks you can assemble quickly:

• Prometheus + Grafana — for synthetic probe metrics, origin and edge telemetry, with alertmanager for rules. If you’re trying to reduce tool overlap, follow the tool rationalization framework.
• Blackbox exporter or cloud-native probes — DNS, TCP/TLS, HTTP probes from multiple regions and networks.
• BGP collectors — BGPStream, RIPE RIS, Routeviews integrated into your observability pipeline.
• RUM (Real User Monitoring) — Web Vitals + DNS timings to detect client impact.
• Log aggregation — structured edge logs for fast search (Elastic/Observability SaaS), and CDN log ingestion to detect error patterns.
• Incident automation — PagerDuty + status page automation; enrich incidents with diagnostic artifacts automatically. For playbook structure, teams often mirror the runbook patterns in the micro-apps DevOps playbook.

Real-world example (anecdote from a UK fintech platform)

In late 2025 a UK fintech noticed intermittent payments failing and a spike in customer error tickets. Their observability stack showed:

• DNS 95th percentile latency increased across several public resolvers.
• Edge 503s from a single CDN POP clustered in one geography.
• BGP withdrawals affecting one upstream carrier coincided with the time window.

Because the team had a single War Room dashboard, they correlated the signals in under 3 minutes and escalated to their CDN provider with BGP traces, aggregated edge logs and DNS probe graphs. The provider confirmed a control-plane issue in a POP and rerouted traffic within 15 minutes; the fintech avoided SLA penalties and updated customers via their status page within 30 minutes. This outcome hinged on three things: prior instrumentation, rapid evidence collection and a tested provider escalation playbook.

2026 Trends & what to plan for next

• RPKI becomes mainstream but not universal — Expect more automated invalidation alerts. Integrate RPKI checks into your BGP monitors and consider enrichment with feeds discussed in future data fabric planning.
• Increasing DoH/DoT adoption complicates DNS observability — More resolver traffic will be encrypted; instrument client-side/edge DNS timings and rely on authoritative metrics where possible.
• More multi-CDN and programmable edge stacks — Observability must cover both control-plane APIs and edge functions; add synthetic tests for edge compute endpoints and consider design notes from edge-powered PWAs.
• Observability-as-code — Define probes, dashboards and alerts in GitOps so they can be versioned and reviewed as part of release processes. The documentation and checklist approach used in micro-app DevOps is a good model (micro-apps DevOps playbook).

Checklist: quick implementation plan (60 / 30 / 7 days)

60 days — foundational

• Deploy synthetic DNS, HTTP and TCP probes across 4+ geographic vantage points (including major UK ISPs).
• Ingest CDN and origin logs into central search and add basic dashboards.
• Hook up BGPStream or an equivalent collector and enable RPKI checks.

30 days — correlation & alerting

• Create the Provider Outage War Room dashboard and the initial alert set (DNS, origin reachability, edge 5xx, BGP origin change).
• Deploy runbooks and an escalation path with provider contact templates.

7 days — readiness & drills

• Run an outage tabletop drill simulating a multi-signal provider failure and practise vendor escalation. Ensure you have durable test gear and kits (power, probes) from field-tested collections such as the portable power & field kit roundups.
• Automate status-page updates and rollback/mitigation scripts (CDN failover, DNS TTL decreases) and test them in a safe environment.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Single vantage point monitoring — Use multiple networks/ISPs; provider outages can be regional and ISP-specific.
• Too many noisy alerts — Correlate signals and require cross-signal confirmation before paging on high-severity alerts. See ideas on reducing tool noise in the tool rationalization guide.
• Not validating RUM vs synthetic — Synthetic tests may pass while real users suffer; always compare both.

"Detection is only useful when it's actionable. Instrument the signals that let you prove to a provider what went wrong — quickly and unambiguously."

Actionable takeaways

• Instrument four signal families: DNS, origin reachability, CDN health and BGP. Correlate them in a War Room dashboard.
• Use multi-vantage synthetic probes + RUM to avoid false classification.
• Adopt a multi-stage alerting ladder that escalates only when correlated signals indicate real user impact.
• Prepare an evidence bundle for vendors: timestamped graphs, traceroutes, and RPKI/BGP data to accelerate provider remediation.
• Practice outages via drills to ensure your runbooks and failover procedures work under pressure.

Next steps — get the checklist and a War Room template

If you’re responsible for uptime and compliance, don’t wait for the next headline outage. Download our Provider-Outage Observability Checklist and Grafana War Room template, or book a short review with our engineers to audit your current observability coverage and run a targeted drill. Email hello@anyconnect.uk or visit anyconnect.uk/observability to get started.

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