Network Resilience & Troubleshooting – with Russ White

In modern networks, failures are not a possibility—they are an inevitability. What separates an average network from a truly robust one is its ability to absorb failures, recover quickly, and remain observable under stress. In this advanced course, industry pioneer Russ White guides you through the fundamental and practical principles behind building and operating highly resilient networks.

This course begins by establishing a deep understanding of network resilience—what it really means, why it matters, and how it should shape your design and operational decisions. You will explore failure domains, risk boundaries, and architectural patterns that reduce the blast radius of outages. Core reliability metrics such as MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) are broken down in practical terms, helping you evaluate and improve the resiliency of your infrastructure.

Visibility and awareness are critical during incidents, so the course covers modern approaches to observability, instrumentation, telemetry, and signal interpretation. You will learn how to think clearly during failure scenarios and how to approach troubleshooting as a structured, repeatable engineering discipline—not guesswork.

Real-world scenarios, including BGP flapping, convergence issues, routing loops, and systemic instability, are analyzed step-by-step to understand both root cause and remediation paths. Finally, the course includes guidance for conducting effective post-mortems—how to document failures, extract meaningful lessons, and design long-term improvements that prevent recurrence.

Whether you are responsible for maintaining large-scale infrastructure or simply want to elevate your troubleshooting and reliability mindset, this course provides a rigorous, practical foundation built on decades of real-world experience.

Key Topics Include:

• What resilience means in network design
• Understanding and shaping failure domains
• MTBF, MTTR, and reliability as measurable engineering outputs
• Observability, telemetry, and signal interpretation
• Systematic troubleshooting methodologies
• Handling BGP flapping and instability
• Building effective post-mortem processes
• Designing for robust, recoverable, failure-tolerant networks

Join Russ White as he brings clarity, depth, and battle-tested strategies to one of the most important skill sets in networking today: keeping networks reliable in an unreliable world.