The Problem: Legacy Tooling and Its Limitations
Currently, Slack utilizes a hybrid approach to network measurement, incorporating both internal (such as traffic between AWS Availability Zones) and external (monitoring traffic from the public internet into Slack’s infrastructure) solutions. These tools comprise a combination of commercial SaaS offerings and custom-built network testing solutions developed by our internal teams over time. This was a suitable enough solution for our needs.
When we began rolling out HTTP/3 support on the edge, there was a significant challenge that we encountered: A lack of client-side observability.
Since HTTP/3 is built on top of the QUIC transport protocol, it uses UDP instead of the traditional TCP. This fundamental shift to a new transport meant that existing monitoring tools and SaaS solutions were not capable of probing our new HTTP/3 endpoints for metrics.
At that time, there was a major gap in the market:
