Operations include diagnosing performance hotspots with minimal performance impact. A system selectively extracts a subset of in-memory application data, for failure analysis, based on application metadata associated with an application. The selective data extraction may be used to generate succinct reports that are customized to explore the specific vulnerabilities of each particular application. Application metadata identifies application data attributes for value extraction. The application metadata may identify, for example, a client attribute which indicates the client which requested the execution of a failed operation (or execution of an operation with a failed sub-function). The application metadata may identify a particular function, associated with an operation, that is to be analyzed in case of operation failure. The application metadata may identify a thread-local variable of a thread, executing an operation, that is to be analyzed in case of operation failure.