“API is down” — but by the time you check, it’s already fine

This has happened to me more times than I can count.

You get an alert that an API is down.
You open logs, dashboards, traces…

and everything looks normal again.

No clear signal of what actually failed.

Most of the time, the only thing you know is:
something broke — briefly — and recovered.

But that’s exactly when the useful context is gone.

I started paying more attention to where failures actually happen:

• DNS resolution

• TLS handshake

• time to first byte

• upstream dependencies

In a lot of cases, the issue isn’t your server at all.

It’s something along the path that only shows up for a moment and disappears.

I’ve been working on a way to capture that context at the exact moment a failure happens — so you’re not debugging after the fact with incomplete data.

Curious how others deal with these “it already recovered” incidents.