Insight and analysis on the information technology space from industry thought leaders.

To Survive Server Crashes, IT Needs a 'Black Box'

While aviation relies on comprehensive black box data for incident investigation, IT organizations struggle to accurately reconstruct what happened after outages.

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Industry Perspectives

September 3, 2025

5 Min Read

black box

Alamy

By Ofer Regev, Faddom

When an aircraft goes down, investigators immediately turn to the black box, which provides a precise record of system data, communications, and environmental variables that help reconstruct exactly what happened. This forensic tool is crucial because aviation recognizes a reality that the IT sector still struggles with: When complex systems fail, educated guesses are not enough.

In IT, server crashes, outages, cybersecurity breaches, and failed changes are inevitable. Yet, many organizations continue to rely on delayed alerts, incomplete logs, and conflicting accounts from team members to identify root causes after an incident. Post-mortem analyses often consist of narratives pieced together from scattered data points rather than objective, comprehensive reconstructions. The gap between what actually occurred and what we understand remains significant. As NIST's Guide to Computer Security Incident Handling emphasized , rapid and accurate incident investigations require comprehensive data sources, not fragmented evidence.

While modern observability solutions enhance real-time visibility, these tools still face limitations in post-incident analysis. According to Splunk's State of Observability 2024 report , 86% of organizations struggle to correlate events across complex environments when diagnosing incidents after they occur. This underscores the growing need for retrospective visibility across hybrid IT stacks.

The 5 Gaps in Retrospective IT Visibility

When a server fails overnight, how quickly can your team confidently explain what went wrong? For most IT organizations, the answer is often not quick and not complete. Five key challenges limit effective incident investigation:

1. Post-Mortems Are Storytelling Exercises: Without real-time dependency mapping, root cause analyses rely on fragmented clues. Teams try to reconstruct timelines using logs, alerts, and assumptions. This method turns incident reports into narratives filled with gaps instead of clear, verifiable reconstructions.

2. Wasted Hours on Change-Related Debates: When outages occur shortly after recent changes, engineers often find themselves spending numerous hours trying to prove that a change did not cause the failure. If teams had access to a visual, time-stamped map of application interdependencies, many of these discussions could be resolved in minutes rather than days. Having objective evidence helps eliminate subjective blame.

3. Tribal Knowledge Does Not Scale: Many organizations depend on application owners to be familiar with their environments. However, as IT infrastructures expand, migrate, or undergo restructuring, this tribal knowledge can become unreliable. Changes in personnel, undocumented dependencies, and years of accumulated complexity can lead to significant blind spots.

4. Observability Illusions: Monitoring tools often track metrics like CPU usage, memory utilization, and system logs. However, these metrics do not provide insight into how servers interact with business applications. For instance, knowing that a server reached 95% CPU usage does not explain its role within a transaction or identify which downstream systems were affected. This highlights the illusion of observability: the misconception that metrics equate to true understanding.

5. Alerts for Symptoms Without Identifying Causes: Traditional alerting systems are designed to notify teams about symptoms rather than the underlying causes. As a result, IT teams may be aware that something has gone wrong but lack clarity on why it happened. For instance, an alert might indicate a database is unreachable, but it may not clarify whether a firewall change, a failed dependency, or network segmentation problems triggered the issue.

Infrastructure's Missing Layer: The Black Box

Security teams utilize Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, and DevOps teams have tracing tools. However, infrastructure teams still lack an equivalent tool: a continuously recorded, objective account of system interdependencies before, during, and after incidents.

This is where Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) solutions come into play. ADM continuously maps the relationships between servers, applications, services, and external dependencies. Instead of relying on periodic scans or manual documentation, ADM offers real-time, time-stamped visibility. This allows IT teams to rewind their environment to any specific point in time, clearly identifying the connections that existed, which systems interacted, and how traffic flowed during an incident.

By serving as a black box for infrastructure, ADM provides organizations with:

Rapid incident reconstruction
Reduced finger-pointing and blame cycles
Accelerated root cause identification
More effective post-mortems and process improvements
Enhanced resilience planning

Beyond Incidents: Broader Benefits of Retrospective Visibility

The value of retrospective visibility goes well beyond just incident response. It also enhances IT audits, compliance reporting, change management, and capacity planning by providing access to objective historical data. When auditors require proof of how systems were configured at a specific time, having a clear record acts as solid evidence. Similarly, analyzing past load patterns and interdependencies for capacity planning can lead to more informed resource allocation.

As hybrid cloud adoption continues to rise, the complexity of modern IT infrastructures increases. Dependencies extend across on-premises data centers, public clouds, SaaS providers, and third-party integrations. Without continuous mapping of these dependencies, the risk of unknown connections and shadow dependencies can weaken both security and operational stability.

The Road Ahead for IT Resilience

Retrospective visibility is emerging as a key focus in IT infrastructure management. As hybrid and multi-cloud environments become increasingly complex, accurately diagnosing failures after they occur is essential for maintaining uptime, security, and business continuity.

IT professionals must monitor systems in real time and learn how to reconstruct the complete story when failures happen. Similar to the aviation industry, which acknowledges that failures can occur and prepares accordingly, the IT sector must shift from reactive troubleshooting to a forensic-level approach to visibility.

About the author:

Ofer Regevhas 18 years of experience in the IT industry. He currently serves as CTO and head of network operations for Faddom (formerly VNT), a startup that raised 12ドル million to help companies map IT infrastructure wherever it lives. Faddom is used to map and monitor over 1 million application instances at organizations like Coca-Cola, NetApp, and UCLA. He previously served in the IDF's elite computing and information services unit, Mamram.