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

The SRE Report 2026: Reliability Is Being Redefined

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

The Hidden Data Engineering Work Required to Make Enterprise AI Viable

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

Why AI Is the Differentiator for Operationally Resilient Organizations

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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

The SRE Report 2026: Reliability Is Being Redefined

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

The Hidden Data Engineering Work Required to Make Enterprise AI Viable

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

Why AI Is the Differentiator for Operationally Resilient Organizations

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...