Spot the Symptoms of Poor App Performance - Part 1

Ricardo Belmar
Learn more about InfoVista

Are your business applications sluggish? Choppy? Prone to getting hung up or crashing at the most inopportune times? If these symptoms sound familiar, you might be suffering from the heartache of … poor application performance. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar:

Symptom 1: Important apps periodically get slow, choppy or just crash

This is the most obvious sign — and the one you're likely to hear about first and loudest from end-users. Internally, your media and collaboration apps get choppy and unresponsive at unpredictable times. Employees complain they can't understand what colleagues are saying over Skype. Or their Slack or Teams connection keeps dropping and asking them to reconnect. Or it takes multiple tries to get a video conference to load.

Symptom 2: Real-time business apps show unexplained faults and errors

As more companies roll out analytics, machine learning and other apps geared towards automating real-time decision-making, they need those apps to work in actual "real time." Think a manufacturing floor applying analytics to optimize production processes, or an oil rig monitoring heavy equipment, or a retailer updating inventory systems. If the real-time data stream those apps rely on gets backed up, it can create unexpected issues in higher-level operations.

Symptom 3: Some apps are sluggish or crashing, while others seem fine

This symptom is quite common, especially in businesses using software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN). For example, users dialing into an important video conference experience lags and disconnects, while people in the break room watch the new Avengers trailer in 4K video without a blip. Your SD-WAN is supposed to optimize app performance, so what's going on here? Well, the SD-WAN is optimizing your apps. The problem is, you have lots of them competing for limited bandwidth, and it's optimizing the wrong ones.

Symptom 4: You've recently deployed new technology and aren't getting the benefits you expected

In your quest to digitally transform your business, you might deploy new tools — like launching a new IoT app in a manufacturing facility or giving sales clerks iPads to help customers check out on the retail floor. But the IoT app isn't lowering your maintenance costs. Or sales conversions haven't gone up the way you expected. The issue might be that those apps require a baseline level of performance that your network can't maintain. In customer-facing situations, staff may even be abandoning the new tools because when they try to use them, they end up with frustrated customers.

Symptom 5: Adding more bandwidth doesn't fix the problem

Many businesses experiencing issues like these think they just need a fatter network pipe. So, they throw more bandwidth at the problem, but it doesn't go away. Especially frustrating, even real-time data flows — where the amount of data transmitted is relatively small — keep getting congested. The likely cause: occasional high-volume data flows (like big file transfers) are overwhelming flows with smaller transactional components. More bandwidth won't solve that problem.

If these symptoms sound familiar, don't worry, you're not alone. App performance issues have become a global epidemic.

Read Spot the Symptoms of Poor App Performance - Part 2, where we try to diagnose what's happening here.

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Spot the Symptoms of Poor App Performance - Part 1

Ricardo Belmar
Learn more about InfoVista

Are your business applications sluggish? Choppy? Prone to getting hung up or crashing at the most inopportune times? If these symptoms sound familiar, you might be suffering from the heartache of … poor application performance. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar:

Symptom 1: Important apps periodically get slow, choppy or just crash

This is the most obvious sign — and the one you're likely to hear about first and loudest from end-users. Internally, your media and collaboration apps get choppy and unresponsive at unpredictable times. Employees complain they can't understand what colleagues are saying over Skype. Or their Slack or Teams connection keeps dropping and asking them to reconnect. Or it takes multiple tries to get a video conference to load.

Symptom 2: Real-time business apps show unexplained faults and errors

As more companies roll out analytics, machine learning and other apps geared towards automating real-time decision-making, they need those apps to work in actual "real time." Think a manufacturing floor applying analytics to optimize production processes, or an oil rig monitoring heavy equipment, or a retailer updating inventory systems. If the real-time data stream those apps rely on gets backed up, it can create unexpected issues in higher-level operations.

Symptom 3: Some apps are sluggish or crashing, while others seem fine

This symptom is quite common, especially in businesses using software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN). For example, users dialing into an important video conference experience lags and disconnects, while people in the break room watch the new Avengers trailer in 4K video without a blip. Your SD-WAN is supposed to optimize app performance, so what's going on here? Well, the SD-WAN is optimizing your apps. The problem is, you have lots of them competing for limited bandwidth, and it's optimizing the wrong ones.

Symptom 4: You've recently deployed new technology and aren't getting the benefits you expected

In your quest to digitally transform your business, you might deploy new tools — like launching a new IoT app in a manufacturing facility or giving sales clerks iPads to help customers check out on the retail floor. But the IoT app isn't lowering your maintenance costs. Or sales conversions haven't gone up the way you expected. The issue might be that those apps require a baseline level of performance that your network can't maintain. In customer-facing situations, staff may even be abandoning the new tools because when they try to use them, they end up with frustrated customers.

Symptom 5: Adding more bandwidth doesn't fix the problem

Many businesses experiencing issues like these think they just need a fatter network pipe. So, they throw more bandwidth at the problem, but it doesn't go away. Especially frustrating, even real-time data flows — where the amount of data transmitted is relatively small — keep getting congested. The likely cause: occasional high-volume data flows (like big file transfers) are overwhelming flows with smaller transactional components. More bandwidth won't solve that problem.

If these symptoms sound familiar, don't worry, you're not alone. App performance issues have become a global epidemic.

Read Spot the Symptoms of Poor App Performance - Part 2, where we try to diagnose what's happening here.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

UK Organizations Hit Observability Breaking Point

UK IT leaders are reaching a critical inflection point in how they manage observability, according to research from LogicMonitor. As infrastructure complexity grows and AI adoption accelerates, fragmented monitoring environments are driving organizations to rethink their operational strategies and consolidate tools ...

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For years, many infrastructure teams treated the edge as a deployment variation. It was seen as the same cloud model, only stretched outward: more devices, more gateways, more locations and a little more latency. That assumption is proving costly. The edge is not just another place to run workloads. It is a fundamentally different operating condition ...

Why Revenue Data Governance Is Now the CIO's Responsibility

AI can't fix broken data. CIOs who modernize revenue data governance unlock predictable growth-those who don't risk millions in failed AI investments. For decades, CIOs kept the lights on. Revenue was someone else's problem, owned by sales, led by the CRO, measured by finance. Those days are behind us ...

Beyond 2026: How 5G, Metaverse, and Edge AI Will Redefine Secure Remote Access

Over the past few years, organizations have made enormous strides in enabling remote and hybrid work. But the foundational technologies powering today's digital workplace were never designed for the volume, velocity, and complexity that is coming next. By 2026 and beyond, three forces — 5G, the metaverse, and edge AI — will fundamentally reshape how people connect, collaborate, and access enterprise resources ... The businesses that begin preparing now will gain a competitive head start. Those that wait will find themselves trying to secure environments that have already outgrown their architecture ...

Why IT Has Become the Proving Ground for Enterprise AI

Ask where enterprise AI is making its most decisive impact, and the answer might surprise you: not marketing, not finance, not customer experience. It's IT. Across three years of industry research conducted by Digitate, one constant holds true is that IT is both the testing ground and the proving ground for enterprise AI. Last year, that position only strengthened ...