2026-07-21 –, Room 1
Lessons learned in troubleshooting Westpac Bank application issues using Wireshark
Westpac bank in Australia has a vast number of applications that traverse our network and interact with multiple network components. It is not uncommon to have intermittent failures that involve interactions with F5 load balancers and firewalls, subtle TLS handshake failures, unsuitable TCP configuration settings, VOIP application dropouts, international (MQSeries based) messaging performance issues and communication channel drops, poorly performing & failed file transfer failures etc. We will show how Wireshark helped locate root cause or prove "it's not the network".
Kevin Tobin has 40 years of experience in the IT industry and has worked with Wireshark from its inception. Kevin has twenty years of public speaking experience and has presented at several IBM conferences worldwide. He is currently employed as Chief Engineer at Westpac Bank in Australia and regularly called upon by the NOC to lead root cause analysis of incidents and outages. Wireshark is his first-choice troubleshooting tool when dealing with hard to find, intermittent failures.