Application performance management (APM) tools are commonly used to monitor, manage, and/or maintain the performance and availability of software applications. Modern businesses rely on many APM tools to reliably deliver mission-critical applications to end users.

Not very long ago, one of our co-founders wrote a post on the million-dollar question in the enterprise networking world. In that post, Ranga discussed how hardware load balancers cannot scale elastically, which is why even web-scale companies such as Facebook and Google leverage software load balancers for elastic autoscaling to match traffic requirements.

Imagine this scenario. It is a Wednesday morning and as the network administrator responsible for servicing business applications, you are processing a series of support tickets that arrived in the past few hours and the previous day. One of the high severity items on your plate this morning is from an application team that has been debugging poor performance of a business critical application. They have received complaints from end users and the line-of-business manager is concerned about potential revenue impacts. The application team has been frantically looking at their logs and haven’t quite pinned down the problem. They now believe it is an issue with the network and want your help finding the source of the problem. By the time the problem has been escalated to you it is already late and they want answers immediately. And just to add to the problem complexity, the issue has been happening sporadically for the last couple of weeks. What do you do?