Monitoring synthetic transactions by application

Use the Synthetic tier in the Application View to monitor the synthetic transactions of an application that are run by BMC Transaction Execution Adapter Agents (TEA Agents), measuring them against defined SLAs. The view helps you identify issues in the application and locate servers where you can begin investigating problems. You can examine and trend server metrics and correlate server issues with application-transaction issues. The Application View helps you diagnose and resolve performance and availability problems with your  synthetic transactions to predict application health and user experience.

This topic contains the following sections:

To examine application issues

From the Applications page, you evaluate the impact and severity of events for your applications. Select one application to closely examine problems in the Application View.

1. From the navigation pane in the TrueSight console, select Monitoring > Applications.
2. Select one application that you want to examine in detail.

The Application View tab opens on the Application Monitoring page if the application was automatically detected by App Visibility. Otherwise, the Synthetic Health tab opens automatically (see Investigating application issues reported by synthetic health events for more details).

In the Application View, you can monitor the health and performance of an application that is monitored by TEA agents. If synthetic monitoring is activated for the application,the Synthetic tier icon (on the lower left side of the Application View) shows a summary of the synthetic executions within the selected time period.

Example of the Application View

To identify the time and severity of application issues

1. In the Application View, select the time and date that you want investigate:
   • By default, the first time you open the Application View, the Live Traffic button is selected and application traffic is updated every five minutes. Click the button, or move the time slider, to stop viewing continual updates and to focus on a specific problem area.
   • The timeline represents a 24-hour period. Move the time slider to select a specific 5-minute interval, or click the next or previous arrows to move 5 minutes on the timeline.

   • From the Date action menu, select a specific date to display in the Application View. 

     Note

     You can select any date, but data is displayed only if it falls within the retention period that you set when you installed App Visibility. Default is 30 days.

     To change the retention period, see Changing App Visibility collector settings.

2. Select a problem period on the timeline:
   
   • Move the time slider over a red or orange region of the timeline. 
     The color of one or more tiers is the same as the region on the timeline. The timeline color reflects the color of the tier with the most severe issue for the selected five-minute period.
   • Click the next or previous arrows to move the problem picker on the timeline. The color of the arrows indicate the status of the next or previous problem.

3. Click the Synthetic Tier, examine the Executions and problems, and then drill down to further diagnostic data.

To drill down to detailed data for the Synthetic tier

1. Click the Synthetic Tier icon to see a grouping of the Execution Plans by status below. 
   
2. Select one or more status groupings to see a list of the individual Execution Plans.
     
3.  Select one or more Execution Plans to view data for those Execution Plans.
4. To drill down further, see Drilling down to synthetic member (Execution Plan) data, Monitoring synthetic transactions by location, and Monitoring synthetic transactions by execution .

Drilling down to synthetic member (Execution Plan) data

Use the following instructions to drill down to detailed data for each Execution Plan.

The color of the Execution Plan corresponds to the highest severity level breached by the executions of the Execution Plan. In other words, the color matches worst problem that the Execution Plan had during the time frame.

1. Select the Summary tab to see the following data:

    

   Column	Description
   Severity	Icon indicating the severity level of the Execution Plan
   Execution Plan Name	Name of the Execution Plan
   Executions	Number of Execution Plan executions that completed (or partially completed) in the time frame. Partially completed means that the Execution Plan includes multiple transactions but only some of the transactions completed in the defined time frame.
   Impacted Executions	Percentage of executions that had one or more errors. Errors can be any of the following: Latency violations Availability errors Accuracy errors Execution errors Violations and errors are according to defined SLA thresholds. For details about metric rule violations, see Investigating application issues reported by synthetic health events.
   Latency Violations	Percentage of executions that exceeded the latency threshold, regardless of the defined SLA threshold
   Availability Errors	Percentage of executions that encountered availability errors, regardless of the defined SLA threshold

    

    

2. Select the Problems tab to see the following data:

    

   Column	Description
   Severity	Icon indicating the severity level of the Execution Plan
   Problem	Type of problem encountered, which can be any of the following: Performance problems Availability problems Accuracy problems Execution problems
   Execution Plan Name	Name of the Execution Plan
   Problem Started	Time and date when the problem which caused the event severity started If the problem started earlier than the displayed time, click the start time to reset the time selection. The time slider moves to the five-minute period that includes the problem start time.
   Threshold	Percentage configured in the SLA threshold
   Current Status	Possible statuses of the problem are as follows: Open—The problem is currently still occurring. Closed—The problem was resolved at the displayed time.

    

    

3. On the Summary tab, click the action menu next to the Execution Plan that you want to investigate and select Show Locations.

The Locations view replaces the Application view data.

Where to go from here

For more details about drilling down to synthetic member data, see Monitoring synthetic transactions by location and Monitoring synthetic transactions by execution.

Related topics

Investigating problems with Web and Business tiers

Analyzing database problems with the Database tier

Setting up and managing synthetic transaction monitoring