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Application Performance

Web Application Monitoring

Every 100 milliseconds of latency costs 1% of sales. Pico's Corvil Web Application Monitoring delivers real-time, packet-based performance monitoring with TLS decryption and Real User Monitoring for globally distributed web applications — with zero impact on the applications being monitored.

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Overview

Pico's Corvil platform delivers Web Application Monitoring that enables real-time performance visibility across globally distributed, cloud-based web and mobile applications with zero impact on the performance of applications or infrastructure being monitored. Corvil's network data analytics engine passively captures all client web services requests and responses, decodes TLS-encrypted traffic, and provides Real User Monitoring with per-client, per-server, per-URL, and per-virtual-server performance reporting — simultaneously across global load balancing, front-end servers, application servers, database tiers, and storage.

The Challenge

Web applications are increasingly business critical — and the cost of performance degradation is directly measurable: every 100 milliseconds of additional latency costs 1% of sales, according to Amazon research. Modern web application delivery environments span thousands of servers distributed globally. TLS encryption conceals the business content that operations teams need for context, insight, and action, further complicating root-cause analysis in environments where the network is often blamed by default before the actual cause has been investigated.

Key Capabilities

Real User Monitoring with TLS Decryption

Corvil performs TLS decryption and TLS handshake analysis to expose the full application-layer content of encrypted web traffic, enabling Real User Monitoring that reports actual performance experienced by each client, server, URL, and virtual server in real time. Provides the business context — user identity, transaction type, application behavior — that is otherwise hidden behind encryption.

Multi-Tier and Multi-Hop Analysis

Corvil isolates application performance issues at each individual tier of the data center infrastructure — from the access layer through web servers, application servers, databases, and storage — using HTTP performance analysis, payload reassembly, and multi-hop correlation. Delineates network access layer problems from hosted application problems, eliminating cross-team blame cycles.

Unparalleled Detail, Fully Searchable

Corvil automatically discovers and decodes network data across many protocols beyond HTTP/HTTPS — including storage, database, and middleware protocols — and fully indexes application content for global search. Every transaction and packet is stored (not just analytics or aggregates), providing a complete audit trail for investigations.

Use Cases

  • Monitoring real user experience per client, server, URL, and virtual server in real time to detect latency increases before they reach the 100ms threshold that research shows impacts conversion rates.
  • Diagnosing multi-tier application delivery failures by isolating which specific tier — load balancer, application server, database, or storage — is responsible for a degraded transaction.
  • Decrypting and analyzing TLS-encrypted web traffic to expose application-layer context such as user identity, URL, and transaction type required for meaningful performance management.
  • Publishing decoded web application performance data to Splunk, Hadoop, or kdb+ via northbound APIs for long-term trend analysis, capacity planning, and business intelligence.

Solution Highlights

  • TLS decryption and TLS handshake analysis expose the application-layer content of encrypted HTTPS traffic — resolving the most common blind spot in enterprise web application monitoring.
  • Microsecond and millisecond granularity captures microburst behavior that 1-second measurement tools miss — revealing the true source of intermittent performance problems.
  • Every transaction and packet is stored — not aggregated or sampled — and indexed for global search across hundreds of sites, ensuring no evidence is lost when a problem is investigated after the fact.
  • Over 400 analytic plug-ins and an open SDK, plus APIs for Big Data integration with Splunk, Hadoop/HDFS, and kdb+, make Corvil an open platform that fits into existing operations toolchains.

What You Achieve

Improved customer experience by detecting and resolving web application latency before it crosses the 100ms threshold that costs 1% of sales per 100ms of additional delay.

Complete visibility into all client web services requests and responses — including TLS-encrypted traffic — provides the full picture needed for accurate diagnosis of complex multi-tier delivery problems.

Integrated network monitoring and application analytics in a single platform with tailored views for multiple teams enables collaborative problem-solving from a shared, authoritative dataset.

Ready to see it in action?

Talk to a Pico specialist about your environment and how Web Application Monitoring fits your needs.