Beyond TCP: Detecting the Silent Data Failure Your WebSocket Hides

WebSocket connections can appear healthy at the TCP layer while application data silently stops flowing—a critical blind spot for systems consuming real-time feeds like price data or event streams. TCP keepalive alone cannot detect this because it only verifies network connectivity, not whether the remote application is actually sending messages. Understanding message-level staleness detection is essential for building reliable distributed systems that depend on persistent WebSocket feeds.