Splunk is crazy, crazy powerful and fast. If you are lucky enough to work for a firm that can afford their licensing (so you can make some really advanced queries), it's an awesome tool to learn in depth.

Optionally he could mount the google drive directly with something like rclone

If you had old traceroutes, i would compare the path it is taking and see what is different about it.

I would also use traceroutes to see if maybe there is packet loss at one of the endpoints along the path. I'm not sure if there is something like pingplotter for unix, but a tool similar to that would potentially be helpful

In your frontend have something like

acl is_whitelisted src -f /etc/hapee-2.6/ipwhitelists/mywhitelist

mywhitelist would contain a cidr or list of cidrs

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32

and then you'd have

use_backend rproxy_ssl if is_whitelisted

The fastest way? Probably netdata