Beyond Logs: Addressing the Hidden Risks in Network & Application Performance Monitoring

September 2025

Beyond Logs: Addressing the Hidden Risks in  Network & Application Performance Monitoring

In today’s digital-first world, customer experience is everything. Whether it’s an online banking transaction, a healthcare portal, or a logistics platform, users expect applications to be fast, reliable, and always available. To deliver on that expectation, organisations rely heavily on Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools.

But here’s the challenge: while NPM/APM tools excel at tracking CPU usage, memory consumption, and logs, they often fail to capture one of the biggest culprits behind outages and poor performance — network issues.

The Visibility Gap

Traditional monitoring tools were designed to watch servers and applications, not the complex, hybrid infrastructures most businesses run today. Cloud migrations, containers, and virtualised environments have made it harder to get a clear view of what’s really happening across the network.

That means when problems arise, IT teams are left asking: Is it the server? The application? Or the network? - and customers feel the pain in the form of slow applications, dropped connections, or complete outages.

According to Gigamon, tools that rely solely on log data can’t always identify the root cause of performance issues, leading to wasted time, frustrated teams, and costly downtime.

Why Executives Should Care

For business leaders, this isn’t a technical inconvenience - it’s a governance and customer trust issue. Slow or unavailable applications translate directly into lost revenue, reputational damage, and unhappy customers.

• Downtime is expensive: Every minute an application is down can cost thousands (or millions) depending on the industry.

• Cloud costs can spiral: Without intelligent visibility, organisations often over-provision resources “just in case,” driving up costs unnecessarily.

• Compliance risks increase: Poor visibility makes it harder to prove adherence to security and regulatory requirements.

Closing the Gap with Deep Observability

This is where network-derived intelligence comes in. By feeding enriched, filtered traffic data into NPM/APM tools, executives gain a clearer, more accurate view of performance across the entire environment - on-premises, cloud, and containers.

With Matrium Technologies and partners like Gigamon, organisations can:

• Resolve issues faster: Reduce mean time to remediate (MTTR) by pinpointing the true source of outages.

• Optimise costs: Eliminate unnecessary data consumption and bandwidth waste by ensuring tools only process relevant traffic.

• Future-proof operations: Scale monitoring as infrastructure evolves, ensuring visibility isn’t lost when new apps, VMs, or containers are deployed.

• Strengthen governance: Gain deeper insights into application communication patterns, supporting compliance and risk management.

The Takeaway for Leaders

NPM and APM tools are essential, but they’re only as good as the data they can see. Without visibility into the network, executives risk flying blind, making it harder to protect revenue, customer trust, and brand reputation.

By extending NPM/APM tools with deep observability, organisations can ensure performance monitoring delivers what the board really cares about: resilient, reliable applications that drive business outcomes.