Getting started with synthetic transaction monitoring

TrueSight Synthetic Monitor provides you, the IT Operations operator, with a way to which help predict and monitor application performance and availability. You can do this by running scripts on applications before they are released to your customers, and you can also run them on applications that are already available, to help predict issues before they become critical.

Applications

An application specialist can manually create applications through the TrueSight console, or use the automatically generated applications through TrueSight App Visibility Manager. The application specialist can configure applications of any kind (automatically discovered or manually created) to provide synthetic transaction data.

Identify problematic applications

From the Applications page (Monitoring > Applications) in the TrueSight console, you can see a high-level, real-time view of all your applications. You can weigh applications by importance (high, medium, low) or view them by the severity of the application events (critical, major, minor, warning, info, OK).

Example of the Applications page, sorted by importance

You can also set up dashlets to more closely monitor the synthetic transactions of specific applications. From the dashlet library , select one or more of the following dashlets:

• Application View: Monitors the health and performance of live traffic and synthetic executions of an application based on SLA settings
• Application Health - Synthetic: Displays key performance indicators based on defined SLAs for applications with synthetic executions that are monitored by App Visibility Manager
• Applications Overview- Synthetic: Displays the overall performance based on defined SLAs for applications with synthetic monitoring enabled

Diagnose an application problem

Select an application to delve into information and events that are all in the context of that application. Depending on the type of application, either the Synthetic Health tab or the Application View tab opens:

Synthetic Health

If synthetic monitoring is enabled for a manually created application, the  Synthetic Health  tab opens by default. The Synthetic Health tab displays the status of your application's synthetic transactions over 24 hours. You can see the overall health, and the health of each location and transaction based on the defined synthetic metric rules for your application.

For more information about the Synthetic Health tab, see Investigating application issues reported by synthetic health events.
For more information about synthetic metric rules, see Synthetic metrics, rules, and events.

To see more detailed information about the transactions, you can click on a tile to see the Analysis. For more details, see Analyzing synthetic health details.

You can also produce synthetic health reports. For more details, see Viewing synthetic health reports.

Application View

For an application that is automatically detected by App Visibility, the Application View opens. The Application View acquires data from App Visibility Manager to present a holistic end-to-end view of an application. The Application View represents the selected application's logical architecture. With the Application View, you can pinpoint the application, date, time, and problem that you want to investigate.

The Synthetic Tier in the Application View represents the aggregated performance of the application's synthetic executions based on defined SLAs. The Synthetic Tier does not indicate the  application's Synthetic Health based on defined synthetic metric rules. Click the Synthetic Tier icon to see a grouping of the Execution Plans by status. 

You can then select one or more of these groupings to see a list of the Execution Plans run on these applications.

Locations view

From the action menu of an Execution Plan in the Application View select Show Locations to see details for the locations where the Execution Plan runs.

Executions view

From the action menu of a location select Show Executions to see details for the executions of this Execution Plan in the selected location.

From the Executions view you can drill down further to see details for a specific execution by viewing the results of timers, or downloading execution logs.