Troubleshooting Network Issues for Your Web Application

Note: The ExtraHop Discovery Edition is no longer actively maintained, but the content of this post is still applicable to existing DE license-holders and Enterprise customers.

Troubleshooting poor web application performance can be frustrating because you don't know where to look first. That's why we created the web application performance troubleshooting guide (no registration required!). It shows how to troubleshoot common web application performance issues using the free ExtraHop Discovery Edition. By analyzing your wire data—all L2-L7 communications on the wire—you can quickly troubleshoot issues caused by overloaded servers, changed APIs, crashed equipment, network bandwidth constraints, and more.

Sometimes the Network Really Is the Problem

virtual packet loss

The steps below demonstrate how you can identify a low-level network connectivity issue. And while this scenario primarily relies on simple L2 analysis, keep in mind that ExtraHop also provides terrific L4 TCP analysis and L7 application-level analysis so that you can dig deeper into web application performance issues.

Looking at the Summary page, we can see what appears to be two minutes (14:47 to 14:49) of almost no activity on the network.

why

There are many other situations where ExtraHop's wire data analytics can help to make life easier. Ready to give it a try? Download the free ExtraHop Discovery Edition today and start analyzing your wire data.

The ExtraHop Discovery Edition is a virtual appliance you can run on a bare-metal hypervisor, on a desktop hypervisor, or in the AWS cloud. It provides you with the ability to listen in on what your servers are communicating to each other on the wire.