Techniques are presented herein for enabling performance monitoring of flows within a management and provisioning tunnel used for communicating packets between a wireless controller and wireless access point devices. A wireless controller that is configured to communicate with at least one wireless access point obtains a packet to be sent to the wireless access point for wireless transmission in a wireless network by the wireless access point. The wireless controller identifies, based on the packet, traffic session flow information associated with the packet. The wireless controller encapsulates the packet with a tunneling header that comprises the traffic session flow information and sends the encapsulated packet to the wireless access point. The tunneling header may also comprise an application identifier (ID) associated with the packet.