SOLUTIONS

Latency Investigation

Don't let milliseconds turn into major incidents.

CHALLENGES

Latency hides in the hops you can't see

Sluggish page loads, choppy video calls, or laggy response times. Experienced network teams know latency is likely to blame, but the challenge is pinpointing where and why it’s happening – before it impacts customer satisfaction and service revenue.

Most monitoring tools measure latency from end to end or from a single vantage point. Latency hides somewhere in between – a firewall, a load balancer, a WAN link, a NAT gateway, or some obscure part of the network. Isolating the exact segment responsible for the delay requires precise and synchronized timing at multiple points in the path at once.

OUTCOMES

What you gain when latency is measurable, not guessed

Higher Service Quality

Prove where latency lives before it impacts customer experiences or SLA commitments.

Reduced MTTR Across Teams

Pinpointing the source of latency in minutes – instead of days of correlating network, security, and application logs.

Fewer Escalations, Less Rework

Resolve issues at the correct location the first time, instead of chasing symptoms elsewhere in the stack.

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SOLUTIONS

Explore how cPacket can help you solve this challenge.

TRADITIONAL SOLUTION

Traditional cPacket Solution

Packet and session data provides an indisputable record of what happens on the network.

cVu packet brokers deliver an indexed, nanosecond-timestamped copy of traffic to cStor capture appliances, which store it and run L7 session analytics to build a granular record of every conversation on the wire.

cClear Control Center brings those results together in dashboards (organized by monitoring point) so teams can identify the exact segment responsible for delay, resolve it, and verify the fix.

REQUIRED PRODUCTS

KEY FEATURES

Nanosecond Timestamping

With an FPGA/ASIC on every port, cVu packet brokers timestamp traffic at the wire, giving every monitoring point a common, trustworthy clock for hop-to-hop comparison.

Location-Aware Traffic Association

cClear Control Center associates VLAN pairs across each tap so analytics can attribute latency to the exact segment of the network where it originated.

Latency by Monitoring Point

Split any connection into legs – client, server, peer – measured independently, so you can isolate whether the network, load balancer, or server caused the delay.

AI SOLUTION

Right tool

cPacket AI Workflow

With cPacket AI, investigating latency no longer means building a Grafana dashboard first.

MCP servers expose cPacket’s monitoring-point metrics and L7 session analytics to natural-language queries, while built-in networking skills guide the model through the same segment-by-segment analysis an engineer would run by hand. The result surfaces the affected monitoring point and probable cause directly, without a dashboard build in between.

REQUIRED PRODUCTS

KEY FEATURES

Investigation by Conversation

Ask which point in the network introduced delay and get an answer pulled directly from cClear's monitoring-point data via MCP, without manual dashboard correlation.

Expert-Level Troubleshooting

cPacket’s built-in network investigation methods cut triage time from hours to minutes.

Evidence-Backed Findings

Verify every root cause by retrieving the exact packets – CPF indexing pulls the relevant capture in seconds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get answers to common questions about network observability and cPacket solutions.

How do I find where latency is happening?

You can use cPacket packet brokers to easily identify the source of latency. Every port timestamps packets in hardware, referenced to a PPS time source. Because that nanosecond timestamp travels with each packet, cStor capture appliances can resequence packets from multiple monitoring points based on when they actually crossed the wire, not by when they were received or where they came from. That lets cClear attribute latency and loss to a specific segment instead of the connection as a whole.

Does this still work across a NAT or firewall that changes the 5-tuple?

Yes. Because each monitoring point is analyzed independently rather than relying on matching one flow's 5-tuple across the translation, latency and loss can still be localized on either side of a NAT or firewall.

What's the difference between a monitoring point and an application in cClear?

A monitoring point identifies where a packet was captured; a service or location names what the traffic is. Keeping these separate lets you filter latency data by application and by physical location independently.

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