Application Performance

Multi-Tier Application Delivery

Pico's Corvil platform tracks every transaction through every hop — correlating end-user experience with the performance of firewalls, load balancers, middleware, application servers, and databases in real time to isolate root cause and eliminate blame cycles across teams.

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Overview

Pico's Corvil platform provides real-time, multi-tier application visibility that correlates end-user experience with the performance of every component in the service delivery chain — including firewalls, load balancers, middleware services, and application servers. Corvil passively monitors packet data flowing through the network to produce a complete, time-sequenced decode of every message involved in servicing a user transaction, then ties together the individual tiers to track each transaction as it moves through the architecture. 60% of IT organizations that deployed Corvil recouped their investment in 6 to 12 months or less.

The Challenge

Operations teams need an accurate, real-time picture of how users experience their services, but that picture changes rapidly due to load spikes, application code updates, or competing workloads. Traditional monitoring tools are siloed: server load metrics, database statistics, and router reports are produced independently, with no transaction-oriented view showing which specific user requests are affected or where in the delivery chain the problem originates. Infrastructure blind spots are a persistent risk — focusing solely on the application server can miss failures at the load balancer, firewall, or middleware bus.

Key Capabilities

Real-Time Transaction Tracking Across All Tiers

Corvil analyzes every tier of the application in real time, producing aggregate reports on user experience alongside the performance of individual components. A single click provides a multi-hop view of any transaction's path, showing response times and error conditions at each processing stage.

Automated Application Discovery and Deep Protocol Decode

Corvil automatically discovers applications and servers directly from network traffic and performs real-time analysis of all application traffic with zero impact on production systems. A library of standard and customized decoding plugins analyzes network flows at each hop to produce a highly accurate time-sequenced decode of every message.

TLS/SSL Decryption and Flexible Integration

Corvil performs real-time decryption of TLS/SSL application data to provide full transaction visibility even before SSL offload, ensuring encrypted traffic does not create blind spots. Corvil Streams integrate metrics into existing IT dashboard systems and big data solutions via a library of connectors.

Use Cases

Receiving proactive alerts on user experience degradation the moment performance baselines are breached — before users submit complaints, enabling remediation to begin immediately.
When a new application code release is pushed to production, Corvil provides immediate feedback on its performance impact across all tiers, allowing teams to confirm successful deployments or roll back quickly.
Tracking individual transactions through each processing stage — reporting response times and error conditions at load balancers, application servers, middleware, and databases — to pinpoint exactly where a misbehaving request encountered its problem.
Distributed teams across multiple monitoring locations manage analysis through a central console, with all sites contributing to a unified view of application performance.

Solution Highlights

Zero-impact passive monitoring discovers applications and servers automatically from network traffic without requiring instrumentation, agents, or changes to production systems.
Real-time TLS/SSL decryption provides full transaction visibility for encrypted application traffic at every tier — eliminating the most common blind spot in multi-tier application monitoring.
Multi-protocol, multi-tier dashboards report user experience and identify overloaded components across HTTP, DNS, LDAP, middleware queues, database protocols, and storage in a single unified view.
A lightweight Corvil application agent extends visibility to critical server-side processing sections not reachable from the wire, without adding meaningful overhead to production application performance.

What You Achieve

60% of IT organizations that deployed Corvil recouped their investment in 6 to 12 months or less, driven by reduced mean time to resolution and the elimination of costly application outages.

Troubleshooting time is dramatically reduced by tracking individual transactions through each processing stage — replacing slow manual correlation across siloed monitoring tools.

Continuous performance reporting for load balancers, application servers, and network services establishes the baselines required to detect regressions introduced by new code deployments.

Ready to see it in action?

Talk to a Pico specialist about your environment and how Multi-Tier Application Delivery fits your needs.

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