19 May 2026 · Field notes
What to send before a traffic review
The ten-day count on a Traffic Review starts when the sample is usable. “Usable” is a dull word and it saves everyone a week.
Send a file, not a photograph of a terminal. CSV, JSON lines, or a plain access log we can parse. If the gateway can export in its native format, prefer that over a hand-made spreadsheet with merged cells.
Write the timezone of the clocks. If some lines are UTC and some are Batumi local time, say so. We will not guess. A deploy ticket stamped in one zone and a log stamped in another is how a sitting spends its first hour on arithmetic.
Name the routes as the gateway names them. If /v2/pay and /v2/pay/ are different location blocks, keep the slash. Send a list of routes you care about even if the log contains others; we still need the others to see weight, but the sitting will lean on your list.
Duration, status, and upstream are the fields that earn their keep. Request ids help with retries. User identifiers should be hashed or omitted. Payloads with card numbers or medical notes must not leave your house. If a field might be unsafe, drop it and tell us it is missing; we can still draw volume and status weather.
A quiet day is a better first sample than the worst hour of the year. We need to see baseline. Once clocks and fields behave, the bad window can follow. If you only have the bad hour, send it, and expect the briefing to be honest about how little ground it has.