Yesterday at 4:30 PM, right before the holiday weekend, I was tasked with pushing a routine Access Control List (ACL) update to our core distribution switches. Per the new enterprise mandate, I ran the configuration through our brand-new, multi-million-dollar Network Digital TwinDigital TwinA highly expensive video game for executives that perfectly simulates how broken the physical network is without actually fixing it..
The software analyzed the telemetryTelemetryA firehose of completely unreadable syslog data that eats all your storage space and is only checked after the network has already crashed., mathematically verified the syntax, and gave me a massive, reassuring green checkmark: Validation Successful. Zero Impact.
The burn-rate timer hit $8,500 before the executives finally admitted the software was hallucinating.
Here is what actually happened.
Armed with my synthetic approval, I pasted the ACL into the primary distribution switch. Instantly, the switch threw a fatal memory exception, dropped its routing adjacencies, and hard-rebooted. Half the campus lost connection to the primary data center.
I rolled the change back immediately and restored service within five minutes. The root cause was obvious to any senior engineer: that specific model of switch, running a severely outdated 2017 firmware version, has a known bug where committing an ACL while the SNMP poller is actively polling causes a kernel panic.
But management refused to accept that their new Intent-Based Networking toy was wrong.
Instead of letting me go home for the 4th of July, the PMO declared a P1 incident. They dragged fifteen people—including the VP of Infrastructure, three Enterprise Architects, the vendor's account manager, and a fleet of project managers—onto a mandatory 90-minute Root Cause AnalysisRoot Cause AnalysisA 10-page document written to politely explain that an intern unplugged the core router to use a vacuum cleaner. bridge.
For an hour and a half, I listened to executives aggressively argue that I must have "failed to properly normalize the synthetic baseline" before running the simulation. They spent thousands of dollars trying to mentally bend reality so they wouldn't have to admit they spent two million dollars on a simulator that can't detect a seven-year-old memory leak.
We didn't optimize our change control process yesterday. We spent over eight thousand dollars in payroll to loudly defend a software vendor's broken promises.
Total waste generated: $8,500.
Next time the Digital TwinDigital TwinA highly expensive video game for executives that perfectly simulates how broken the physical network is without actually fixing it. gives you a green checkmark, don't trust it. Keep your terminal open, get ready for the rollback, accept the inevitable RCA invite, and start the timer.
