If a company's web servers are intermittently failing load balancer health checks, which troubleshooting approach starts at the application layer?

The top-down troubleshooting approach begins at the highest layer of the OSI model, which is the application layer, and works its way down through the layers of the network stack. This method focuses on the application and its interactions with the underlying network, protocols, and hardware.

In the scenario where web servers are intermittently failing health checks from a load balancer, using a top-down approach would entail examining the application first. This means looking into issues like application logic, performance under load, or any software bugs that might cause the application to become unresponsive or slow, thereby failing the health checks.

By starting at the application layer, issues related to the application's configuration, coding errors, or unexpected traffic patterns can be identified and resolved before investigating lower layers such as the transport or network layers. This could help in quickly pinpointing the problem, particularly if the application itself is the root cause of the failure to respond properly to the load balancer's health checks.

Other approaches, such as bottom-up, would start from the physical layer and work upward, which may not be efficient in this case since the symptoms are manifesting at the application level. The divide-and-conquer method could be useful for complex systems but still requires an understanding of where to segment the