Five Reasons You Still Can’t Pinpoint Application Performance Issues

Gigamon works with hundreds of organizations running modern applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The pattern is familiar: Users complain about slow response times, dashboards show latency spikes, and yet the root cause remains unclear.

You have all the tools in place — Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is running, logs are streaming, dashboards are active and full of alerts.

Still, the question lingers: Is it the application or the network?

The tools are not broken — they are just not seeing the whole picture. And that is where the visibility gap begins.

1. You Are Monitoring Everything — Except What Matters

Most application performance monitoring tools rely on agents or sampled and logs-based data. But agents can’t capture what is happening between services. Logs are often delayed, incomplete, or miss what is outside the application layer. Sampled data uses NetFlow/sFlow that often misses the lateral East-West traffic.

What is missing is deep observability. Real-time, network-derived telemetry. This is where early indicators live: connection errors, retransmissions, latency, unexpected traffic spikes, or misrouted flows.

That insight does not come from logs. It comes straight from the packets.

2. The East-West Gap Is Real — and Growing

Modern applications are distributed by design. Microservices, container workloads, and cloud-native architectures depend on service-to-service communication that rarely passes through traditional monitoring chokepoints.

Most tools still focus on North-South traffic. But what is happening inside the environment? Lateral East-West traffic is often completely unobserved.

Without visibility into how services talk to each other inside your infrastructure, you are blind to the exact path users take through your applications.

3. Encryption Is Critical — but It Obscures Insight

Encryption is essential, but it creates a new challenge: visibility gaps. Tools that depend on payload inspection either require full decryption, which introduces security and compliance risks, or simply give up visibility.

The approach that Gigamon Application Metadata Intelligence takes is selective decryption where permitted, or encrypted metadata extraction where it is not. This means you still get visibility into key metrics like:

• Expired or mismatched certificates
• Protocol violations
• Unusual handshakes or renegotiation attempts

You maintain privacy without sacrificing performance insight.

4. You Are Drowning in Telemetry but Starving for Signal

Raw traffic ingestion comes at a cost: in tool performance, in analysis time, and in licensing. Too often, teams send unfiltered packets or logs into APM or SIEM platforms, creating data bloat that slows everything down.

What’s needed isn’t more data. It’s the right data.

Gigamon AMI extracts and delivers close to 6,000 enriched metadata attributes that are structured, lightweight, and immediately actionable. This enables your existing observability tools to analyze faster, trigger smarter alerts, and reduce false positives.

5. You Are Still Reacting to Symptoms Instead of Solving the Root Cause

Without enriched application metadata, teams often rely on what’s visible from the outside: system metrics, user-reported issues, or high-level service health checks.

But knowing that something is wrong isn’t enough.

Gigamon AMI gives you the detail to pinpoint what went wrong, where, and why:

• Is the backend server experiencing packet loss?
• Is there a burst of TCP resets during high traffic periods?
• Is traffic routing through an unexpected path?

With deep observability, teams move from reactive triage to proactive resolution.

The Path Forward

Application performance troubleshooting is not just about having more tools, it is about feeding those tools the right data at the right time with smarter, cleaner, and more context-rich telemetry.

Gigamon AMI turns network traffic into structured insight, helping you detect issues earlier, resolve them faster, and eliminate blind spots across your hybrid infrastructure.

See how you can proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve application performance monitoring issues. 

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