---
title: "Production Incident Troubleshooting — Tran Manh Tuan"
description: "Production incident response, root-cause analysis, CDN and edge debugging, and separating application faults from infrastructure faults."
canonical: "https://tmtuan.dev/en/services/production-troubleshooting"
language: "en"
image: "https://tmtuan.dev/_img/og/default.5d198072-og.jpg"
tokens: 918
---

# Production Troubleshooting

Finding out what is actually wrong when a production failure does not stay inside one layer.

The failures that take longest are rarely the ones with a clear stack trace. They are the ones where the application looks fine, the infrastructure looks fine, and the problem only appears for certain clients, certain regions, or certain request paths — so each team can reasonably conclude it is not theirs.

What that needs is not a guess at the fix but a method: reproduce the failure precisely, isolate which layer it originates in by testing each one directly, and keep narrowing until the actual cause is identified rather than a plausible-sounding one. The fix is usually the short part.

Every engagement ends with something that prevents a silent repeat — a monitor, a smoke test, or a log that would have caught it.

## Typical engagements

- Investigating an incident that crosses application, infrastructure and CDN boundaries
- Failures that only affect some clients — crawlers, specific regions, specific routes
- Deciding whether a problem belongs to the application or the platform it runs on
- Adding the monitoring that would have caught the failure earlier

## Related work

- [TaxPal](https://tmtuan.dev/en/projects/taxpal)

  Sales analytics for an accounting-services brokerage in Japan: cases, KPI targets against actuals, rankings and pipeline conversion by staff member, team and company.

- [How I Traced a Googlebot-only HTTP 500 Across Next.js, Cloud Run and the Hosting Edge](https://tmtuan.dev/en/articles/googlebot-500-firebase-hosting-nextjs)

  Users and every other crawler got 200 while Googlebot got 500 site-wide. The cause: a 404-path regression amplified by crawler verification at the hosting edge.

## Technologies used in this work

- Apollo Client
- AWS AppSync
- AWS Cognito
- AWS Lambda
- Docker
- Elasticsearch
- GraphQL
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- React
- Terraform
- TypeScript

## Is this a fit?

- A good fit: business systems, backends and APIs, GCP and AWS infrastructure, production incidents.
- Not the right fit: work that is mainly pixel-perfect UI or heavy animation.

If this sounds like the problem you have, [Send a project brief](mailto:tmtuan801@gmail.com?subject=Project%20inquiry%20%E2%80%94%20tmtuan.dev&body=Project%20type%3A%20custom%20business%20system%20%2F%20web%20platform%20%2F%20cloud%20%26%20DevOps%20%2F%20production%20issue%20%2F%20other%0D%0A%0D%0AWhat%20needs%20to%20be%20built%20or%20fixed%3A%0D%0A%0D%0ACurrent%20stack%20(if%20any)%3A%0D%0A%0D%0ATimeline%3A%0D%0A%0D%0ABudget%20range%20(optional)%3A%0D%0A).

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