Foglight APM for Real User Experience 5.9.11 - User Guide

Exploring alarms on web sites or endpoints

When the performance of a monitored site or endpoint meets one of the conditions defined in a multiple-severity rule, Foglight triggers an alarm and sets the site’s or endpoint’s state icon to indicate the severity level of the performance issue. You should review any high-severity alarms that show up in the time range you are interested in.

TIP: You can modify the conditions in multiple-severity rules to better suit your environment. For more information, search for “Rules” in the online help.

The most important alarms to take action on are those that occur on a site or endpoint in the Busiest Web Sites or Busiest Endpoints views. The Alarm view highlights these sites|endpoints. In addition, any high severity (Fatal and Critical) alarms outside of the top 50 should be assessed. These alarms appear at the top of the selector list.

This walkthrough recommends setting the quick view and looking at the Alarm view to see if there are any alarms in the top 50 sites|endpoints. If you prefer to restrict the quick view to show one set of alarms, such as all Fatal alarms, start your investigation by clicking a severity icon on a tile.

TIP: For Warnings, depending on the issue, an appropriate action may be to acknowledge the alarm and ignore it.

Investigating a web site or endpoint

When you need more information than the Busiest view or Alarm view provides, select the site or endpoint of interest. The Results view changes to show a set of charts containing hit performance, page performance, warnings, and errors for the time range. You can use these charts to discover whether the average times reflects a consistent level of performance, or if the performance is uneven. From here, even more data is available by clicking a chart or the Explore button.

Many things can cause a sudden change in performance or errors. Here are a few possibilities:

NOTE: For descriptions of the metrics in this and other dashboards, search the online help using the metric name. For hit errors and warnings, look up “Status Metrics.”

Troubleshooting an excessive number of monitored web sites

If you have an excessive number of web sites reported in this dashboard, consider aggregating data capture for similar sites. For example, if you attribute the data collected for alias sites to the primary site, then only the primary site appears in this dashboard. In general, data aggregation makes the data more manageable and more meaningful in all dashboards.

To define data aggregations, an APM Administrator creates domain rules. In a troubleshooting scenario, where you want a quick way to aggregate data for a large number of similar sites, use a regular expression that matches multiple sites and map the sites to a fictitious (or real) domain name. For information about defining domain rules, see “Managing domain rules” in the Foglight APM Administration and Configuration Guide.

NOTE: Only data captured after the domain rule is created is aggregated. Historical data is not affected.

Consider a scenario where all sites of interest are identified in the dashboard by domain names, but Foglight APM is also monitoring a proliferation of IP addresses that are of little or no interest. The following regular expression matches all IP addresses and aggregates them under a single fictitious domain called myOtherSites.com. This rule eliminates the “noise” generated by all the extraneous sites and allows you to focus on what really interests you.

Find: \b\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b

Replace: myOtherSites.com

Searching APM data

Foglight captures, decrypts, analyzes, and stores a vast amount of data about how real users navigate your web sites and applications, the performance of the web servers and application servers in your infrastructure, and the performance of Java™ applications and .NET® applications. This data is stored as details in the Archiver database.

You can see the details when you drill down from the top-level dashboards (Geographical Perspectives, Sequence Explorer, and Web Sites and Endpoints dashboards). In the top-level dashboards, you view aggregated metrics derived from the details. For example, in the Sequence Explorer, you see exit counts that represent a total for all users who performed the same sequence of steps. When you drill-down on a tile, you can navigate to the expanded details in a Search dashboard. So for the sequence, you can drill down to the captured sequences to evaluate individual user experiences.

You may come across situations where you want to search the Archiver database directly using your own search criteria. For example, if a real user reports having issues with your web site, you can search for the session and replay it to see what your user experienced. Each type of search has its own dashboard and offers a simple search and an expert search. You can save searches and rerun them later. You can also run the last search and clear search results.

From search results, you can replay a hit, sequence, or session to see what your real user experienced while navigating your site or application. You can also view search results in a map or pivot chart. For more information, see Replaying sessions, hits, and sequences and Visualizing search results.

You can perform the following tasks from the Search dashboards: