Distributed services play an increasing role in our daily lives and our economy. Unfortunately, as they importance grow, so does their complexity, and the difficulty to analyze, verify, and validate them. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our experience analyzing real-life distributed platforms, and the lessons we learnt doing so. One key problem is the fact that real-life distributed systems usually rely on large stacks of legacy and third-party software. Because of that, they usually cannot be fully analyzed with entirely automated approaches. I will use our experience in this area (which has mainly exploited heuristics, and semi-automatic analysis tools) to suggest potential synergies between verification techniques, and interactive analysis tools.