Foglight for Application Operations 5.9.8.5

The Transactions dashboard enables you to visualize end user data without the need to create services in Foglight. Use this dashboard to quickly identify if any transactions are having issues, to determine the magnitude of impact on the user population, and to view preliminary information that can aid in troubleshooting, including geographic discrepancies and whether the performance problems are in the back-end architecture, or the client-side browser or network.


	TIP: The Service Operations Console includes a Transaction tab that displays transactions as services. The investigative workflow is similar to that described here.

To investigate a transaction:

On the navigation panel, under Dashboards, click APM > Transactions.

Click the down arrow in the Show transactions in box and select the transaction group you want to view from the list.


	TIP: Use the Tile Display Options, located in the action panel on the right, to control how many tiles are displayed and how data is rolled up for viewing. For more information, see Configuring display options.

Locate a transaction group that is experiencing errors. For example, users in the Physician transaction group are experiencing poor performance. The health status icon indicates Warning status

. The transaction has not yet experienced a complete failure, but some component needs attention.

Figure 2. A transaction group, with the warning status illustrated


	TIP: This tile indicates that this user traffic is monitored by Foglight APM Appliances. For an overview of this investigation with FxM users, see Exploring response time breakdowns from the SOC.

Click the name of the transaction in the title bar of the tile to drill down for more information.

The transaction detail view opens.


	TIP: The detail view, and the tabs available, depend on the type of transaction selected. For example, drilling down on a Real User (APM) tile opens a performance detail view (as shown), while drilling down on a pivot result opens a summary view with tiles for each type of pivot you have defined (see Pivot Breakdown detail view for details).

The Hits tab and Pages tab summarize the pivots available from the hit analyzers configured for the transaction.

Click the Pages tab. Here you can see that the Warning status has been triggered by the Service Level Attainment for Back End dropping below an acceptable threshold.

Figure 3. An example of the Pages tab of a transaction detail view

Click Find Related Hits to investigate further.

The Search Hits page opens. From here, you can continue your investigation using the Foglight APM Appliances Search dashboards. For more information, see the Foglight APM User Guide.

Instead of drilling down to the hit search, you may be interested in determining where in the transaction path the issue is occurring. You can review this by clicking the Response Time Breakdown tab.

Figure 4. An example of the Response Time Breakdown tab of a transaction detail view.

On the Response Time Breakdown tab you can see the execution time for a request as it passes through the various components that are included in the transaction group.


	NOTE: The execution times in this view are aggregated for the current timeslice.

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The upper portion of the tab provides a list of components, with the average execution time for the current timeslice, and a sparkline that illustrates the average execution time during the selected time range.

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The lower portion of the tab provides the same average execution time information in a dependency path view. The average execution time for each component is displayed below the icon for the component.

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Application servers are clustered in the dependency path view. The list of components provides a tree view of servers included in the cluster.

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The dark grey arrows (Paths in the current timeslice) indicate the path taken by at least one request in the current timeslice (for example, between 3:20 and 3:25pm).

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The light grey arrows (Paths in selected time range) indicate the path taken by at least one request in the time range selected with the zonar (for example, the last four hours).

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A yellow exclamation mark indicates that an error has occurred within the marked component during the current timeslice.

Here you can see that the execution times for both application servers in the cluster are longer than they should be to meet the service levels. This is why users are experiencing problems.

From here you can:

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Click Explore Breakdowns to open the Response Time Breakdown Explorer. For more information, see Examining Response Times.

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Click Explore Errors to open the Error Breakdown Explorer. For more information, see Examining Error Breakdowns.

For more information about the tiles, detail views, and metrics, see APM Tile and View Reference.

Investigating application server transactions

The Transactions dashboard allows you to visualize application-specific transaction data (that is, Java™ EE or .NET® transactions) with or without end user data. Use this dashboard to quickly identify if any transactions are having issues, and to view preliminary information that can aid in troubleshooting, including geographic discrepancies and whether the performance problems are in the back-end architecture, or the client-side browser or network.


	TIP: The Service Operations Console includes a Transaction tab that displays transactions as services. The investigative workflow is similar to that described here.

In order to populate the Transactions dashboard or the SOC Transactions tab with data from Foglight for Java EE Technologies or Foglight for Microsoft .NET (version 5.9.1 or later), ensure that you used the appropriate procedures in Configuring request breakdowns.

To investigate an application server transaction:

On the navigation panel, under Dashboards, click APM > Transactions.

Click the down arrow in the Show transactions in box and select the transaction group you want to view from the list.


	TIP: Use the Tile Display Options, located in the action panel on the right, to control how many tiles are displayed and how data is rolled up for viewing. For more information, see Configuring display options.

Locate an application server transaction group.

Figure 5. An example of a bottleneck appearing on a transaction group tile

In this example, MedRec1Server1 is causing a bottleneck. It is performing poorly, as indicated by the warning icon (

Click the name of the transaction (/physician-web/physician (phys...)) in the title bar of the tile to drill down for more information.

The transaction detail view opens.

On the Response Time Breakdown tab you can see the execution time for a request as it passes through the various components that are included in the transaction group.


	NOTE: The execution times in this view are aggregated for the current timeslice.

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The upper portion of the tab provides a list of components, with average execution times for the current timeslice, and a sparkline that illustrates the average execution time during the selected time range.

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Application servers are clustered in the dependency view. The list of components provides a tree view of servers included in the cluster.

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The dark grey arrows (Paths in the current timeslice) indicate the path taken by at least one request in the current timeslice (that is, the most recent sample period reported by the agent).

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The light grey arrows (Paths in current time range) indicate the path taken by at least one request in the time range selected with the zonar (for example, the last four hours).

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A yellow exclamation mark indicates that an error has occurred within the marked component during the current timeslice.

Here you can see that the execution time for the application server MedRec1Server1 is longer than it should be to meet service levels.

From here you can:

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Click Explore Breakdowns to open the Response Time Breakdown Explorer. For more information, see Examining Response Times.

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Click Explore Errors to open the Error Breakdown Explorer. For more information, see Examining Error Breakdowns.

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Click the Application Infrastructure tab to investigate the application components. This tab displays a tile for each component. In this example, there is a host (medrecapp1.example.domain) and an application server (MedRec1Server1).

Here you can see that the application server has a warning related to one request.

Figure 6. Application server with a warning related to one request

Click the name of the application component in the title bar of the tile to drill down for more information.

For example, click medrecapp1.example.domain to investigate the host performance in the Host detail view. Or click MedRec1Server1 to investigate the requests in the Application Server detail view.

For more information about the tiles, detail views, and metrics, see APM Tile and View Reference.

Configuring display options

You can customize the layout of the Transactions dashboard by selecting the appropriate options in the Tile Display Options dialog box. Use these options to control the total number of tiles, the order in which they appear, and the rollup options for multiple FTR locations (if applicable).


	NOTE: These settings apply on a per-user basis.

To configure display options:

With the APM > Transactions dashboard open in the display area, open the action panel on the right side of the browser interface.

Click Tile Display Options.

The Tile Display Options dialog box opens.

Figure 7. Tile Display Options dialog box

Configure the following options, as required.

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The Enable Grouping option groups user tiles together by transaction name. By default, groups are sorted by their severity first, then by their name. This grouping is not affected by the Sort Order options.

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The Show at most n tiles or groups setting determines the total number of tiles displayed. Synthetic transaction locations are first rolled up using the rollup criteria below. After that, the total number of tiles is determined by the maximum number of tiles that you specify.

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You can roll up synthetic transactions locations into multi-location FTR (Synthetics) tiles based on the criteria below, in the following order:

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the maximum number of single-location Synthetics tiles, using the Rollup if there are more than n FTR tiles setting, and then

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the maximum number of locations per script, using the When there are more than n location(s) for a script setting.

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Use the Sort Order options to sort the tiles by either type (Real End Users first) or alarm severity (Sort by Alarm State).

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For example, you can configure the Transactions tab to display a maximum of ten tiles sorted by the alarm state (highest severity first).

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The Show Transaction Pivots option controls whether transaction pivots are displayed. If you do not want to see Pivot tiles, clear this check box.

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The Rollup Pivots option controls whether pivot data are grouped together or rendered individually. For example, Foglight can roll up all pivots such as Chrome™, Firefox®, Internet Explorer®, and Opera™ into a single web browsers pivot tile.

Click Save.

The Tile Display Options dialog box closes and the Transactions dashboard refreshes, reflecting the updated display options.