Anonymized case study. Client name and identifying metrics are withheld. Patterns reflect representative senior .NET programs.
Executive summary
A high-volume order and payment pipeline on .NET microservices showed intermittent timeouts during peak events. Engineers traced SQL blocking, non-idempotent consumers, and broker settings misaligned with database capacity.
The challenge
Generous retry policies collided with handlers that were not idempotent. SQL showed periodic blocking on hot tables. Load tests never replayed production cardinality.
Technical approach
Execution plan review and index fixes, idempotency keys on payment messages, outbox for critical publishes, consumer concurrency aligned to broker limits, and OpenTelemetry runbooks for on-call.
Outcomes
Peak events completed without prior SLA breaches. Duplicate charge rate dropped to finance-approved levels. On-call used shared dashboards instead of tribal knowledge.
Discuss a program like this
Share your constraints and stack—we will outline fit and what proof we can share on a discovery call.