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Foglight APM for Real User Experience 5.9.9 - Administration and Configuration Guide

Getting started Configuring traffic capture
Managing Sniffers Managing Archivers Managing capture groups Managing sessionizing policies Managing monitored ports Managing monitored IP addresses Managing monitored subnets Managing identifiers for virtual addressing schemes Managing private keys Managing web services and SOAP operations
Configuring traffic analysis Configuring analyzers Capturing traffic outside the network Configuring advanced options Integrating Foglight APM with other products Maintaining and troubleshooting Appendix: Building regular expressions in Foglight Appendix: Traffic analysis processing
Understanding the traffic analysis workflow Stage 1: Run hit analysis Stage 2: Run sequence analysis Stage 3: Finalize stopped sequences Stage 4: Finalize the session Example of interdependent analyzers Online-Only Topics
Removing items from a table Defining extraction expressions Adding, copying, and editing archivers Testing archivers Configuring archiver database shard settings Adding, copying, and editing sniffers Testing sniffers Adding and editing capture groups Testing capture groups Adding and copying sessionizing policies Editing sessionizing policies Selecting session identifiers from a discovery list Adding and editing session identifier variables Organizing session identifiers Selecting user name variables from a discovery list Adding and editing username rules Selecting URL prefixes from a discovery list Adding or adding URL prefixes Selecting ports from a discovery list Adding or editing monitored ports Selecting IP addresses from a discovery list Adding or editing monitored IP addresses Looking up host names for all monitored IP addresses Associating private keys with IP addresses Selecting subnets from a discovery list Adding and editing monitored subnets Adding identifiers Editing identifiers Finding IP addresses in HTTP headers Configuring a custom HTTP header using Microsoft IIS Manager Adding and editing local private keys Adding and editing HSM private keys Exporting keys using Microsoft Management Console Adding or editing web services Importing WSDL files to define web services Managing custom fields and metrics Adding, copying, and editing custom fields Removing custom fields Editing custom metrics Removing custom metrics Managing sensitive data Adding, copying, and editing sensitive hit detail policies Adding, copying, and editing sensitive content expression policies Modifying members of pivot categories Selecting aliases from a discovery list Adding, copying, and editing domain rules Adding, copying, and editing large hit details Adding, copying, and editing URL classifiers Reviewing rules for browser category, browser, and operating system hit details Adding user-defined user agent rules Adding and editing additional parsed response types Adding and editing captured request body types Adding, copying, and editing scripts Removing scripts Referencing configuration objects in a script Testing regular expressions Syntax for test data Adding simple hit analyzers using the Setup Wizard Adding simple sequence analyzers using the Setup Wizard Adding analyzers Copying analyzers Editing analyzers Adding and editing conditions Creating a simple Boolean expression Creating a complex Boolean expression Disabling standard metrics generated by a hit analyzer Adding custom metrics Editing custom metrics Selecting pivot categories Breaking out metrics into dynamically-named topology objects Publishing metric timeslices for the Geographical Perspectives dashboard Changing SLA thresholds Adding custom field updates Editing custom field updates Adding scripts to an analyzer Editing scripts Creating new scripts on the fly Adding hit storage restrictions Editing hit storage restrictions Adding sequence events Editing sequence events Adding static page elements Editing static page elements Viewing resource files defined by static page elements Adding and editing subnet filters Exporting configurations Exporting encrypted configurations Restoring a previous configuration Importing saved configurations Importing hit analysis configurations from Foglight Experience Viewer Using the Import Configuration Wizard

Capturing traffic outside the network

Sniffers and Archivers are exceptionally good at monitoring and capturing web traffic occurring within a physical or virtual network. And while they can capture data about calls out to external resources and back to internal web servers, they have little insight into the activities occurring on those external resources. For example, a Sniffer cannot measure how long it takes for a content delivery network (CDN) server to respond to a request for content. The Sniffer can track only the time spent by an in-house web server responding to the initial page request (Initial Response Time), before the request is passed on to a CDN server to provide the page content—which obviously does not reflect an end user’s experience of how long it took for the page to load.
Browser instrumentation is a small JavaScript library, packaged as a single file, and included in a web page for the purposes of monitoring page performance and application health from inside the browser. This section helps you decide when to implement browser instrumentation, and describes how to set up an instrumented monitoring solution:
•
Deciding when to add browser instrumentation
•
Introducing the instrumentation components
•
Configuring an instrumented monitoring solution
•
Verifying instrumentation payloads are received
•
Viewing metrics collected by instrumentation

Deciding when to add browser instrumentation

You may want to add browser instrumentation when monitoring the following types of web sites and web applications.
•
Web 2.0/AJAX Application — In Web 2.0 applications, the client’s browser does most of the processing for the application and also maintains most of the information about the state of the client. For example, an AJAX-based application makes asynchronous XMLHttpRequest calls to the web server, and the web server responds with fragments of content or raw data, which are then interpreted by the client-side JavaScript. To monitor the performance and health of the client’s browser, you need to instrument web pages in the application.
•
Mashup Web Site or Application — A mashup web site or web application combines first-party dynamic content with dynamic content from third parties, such as social media sites (for example, Twitter or Facebook) and remote advertising servers. With all this extra content outside the control of your site or application, you cannot fully understand your end users’ experience of these pages without the extra information provided by browser instrumentation.
•
Cloud-based Web Site or Application — Cloud environments are complex, dynamic, and elastic, which makes Sniffer deployments impractical. Browser instrumentation is currently the only way to monitor cloud-based web sites or web applications.
•
Content Delivery Network (CDN) — When monitored web sites or web applications use a CDN to deliver static content, a Sniffer cannot measure how long the CDN servers take to respond to a request for an individual piece of content. Browser instrumentation provides the missing timing data, which in turn enables a Sniffer to report more accurate values for page load metrics.

Introducing the instrumentation components

The Foglight approach to instrumentation is similar to other types of instrumentation you may have used for analytics. Foglight instrumentation has two components: the instrumentation library and the instrumentation listener. To learn how to implement instrumentation, see Configuring an instrumented monitoring solution.
Instrumentation library
The instrumentation library is a JavaScript file approximately 10 KB in size. The library contains a set of APIs to collect browser event information and capture content displayed in the browser. It also implements the W3C Navigation Timing interface, described in http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-navigation-timing-20121217/, to collect performance data for browsers that support this interface. For a list of the details captured by the instrumentation library, including the Navigation Timing properties used to calculate them, see “Instrumentation and navigation timing metrics” in the Foglight APM Reference Guide.
 
* 
TIP: Most current browser versions support the Navigation Timing API. To find out which earlier versions support the API, search the Internet for “navigation timing api browser support.”
The instrumentation library loads as part of the initial page load. As the page executes, the script tracks JavaScript errors and logging data as well as the navigation timing data. The scripts assigns the header X-1EUQuestInstrumentation to instrumentation hits, batches the data into instrumentation payloads, and forwards payloads asynchronously to the instrumentation listener. If the instrumented page uses SSL, the payload is sent to the listener using SSL.
The instrumentation library does not interfere with normal page execution, and when using the default script settings, script activity has a negligible affect on page performance.
Instrumentation Listener
The instrumentation listener is the host URL of the original HTML page. If a Sniffer is already monitoring the web site or application you want to instrument, you do not need to do anything else to set up an instrumentation listener. When the instrumentation library sends an instrumentation payload to the web server using the POST command, the server sees the post and returns a response. The Sniffer monitors this conversation, and sends the captured data to Archivers for further processing and storage as instrumented details and metrics for that page hit.

Configuring an instrumented monitoring solution

To track client-side events and performance data, you need to instrument monitored web sites or applications and also ensure that a Sniffer is monitoring the same site or application. You can instrument an entire web site or application (by including the instrumentation library in a global header), or you can instrument only the pages you are interested in.
By default, the instrumentation library posts its payloads to <host_URL>/empty.txt. For example, if you instrument the web site www.dell.com, the library posts to www.dell.com/empty.txt.
 
* 
IMPORTANT: You must deploy an empty file named empty.txt onto your web site so that, when the instrumentation posts data to the web site, it will not result in the Object Not Found (404) response code. Failing to do so results in lots of 404 errors being generated after you deploy the javascript instrumentation.
To configure an instrumented monitoring solution:
1
In Foglight, download the instrumentation library.
a
In the navigation panel, under Dashboards, click Administration > Cartridges > Components for Download.
b
Click JS Instrumentation.
c
Click Download.
d
Follow your browser’s prompts to save the instr.js file.
2
Copy instr.js to the same location as other scripts used by your monitored web site or application.
3
In the text editor of your choice, open a file where you want to add a call to the script.
Do one of the following:
•
To monitor an entire site/application, open an appropriate global header file.
•
To monitor individual web pages, open a page file.
4
Add the <script> statement shown in the following code snippet to the file, substituting in the relative path to the script in your environment. Enclose the <script> tag within the <head> tag as close to the top as possible.
 
* 
IMPORTANT: For the id attribute, ensure that you specify "--foglight-script--" exactly as shown, including all dashes.
    <head>
    ...
    <script
        type="text/javascript" src="<path>/instr.js" id="--foglight-script--">
    </script>
    ...
    </head>
5
Save the file.
6
If you are monitoring individual web pages, copy the <script> statement to the other pages.
7
If you are not sure that one of your Sniffers is monitoring the instrumented site or application, check the Web Sites and Endpoints dashboard.
a
Log in to Foglight.
b
On the navigation panel, under Dashboards, click APM > Web Sites and Endpoints.
c
If the Web Sites quick view is not showing, click the Web Sites tile.
d
Verify that the instrumented web site or application is in the list of Web Sites.
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