Investigating application issues reported by synthetic health events

For applications with synthetic transaction monitoring enabled, you as the application operator can identify and diagnose application issues by investigating the status of synthetic transactions. The Synthetic Health tab displays events that are opened based on synthetic metric rules, which help you pinpoint issues with transactions so that you can understand and locate problems quickly.

For more details about synthetic metric rules, see Synthetic-metrics-rules-and-events.

This topic contains the following information:

Before you begin

Before you can examine the health of your synthetic transaction, ensure that your system meets the following conditions:

To access the Synthetic Health tab, you must be logged in with Application Operator-level access, or higher.
(Optional) Synthetic metric rules are defined, usually by an application specialist in your organization.
If you do not define your own synthetic metric rules, only the global metric rules for performance, availability, accuracy, and execution events are evaluated.

To investigate application issues with synthetic health events

Select an application from the Applications page to examine application issues closely.

From the navigation pane in the TrueSight console, select Monitoring > Applications.
Select one application that you want to examine in detail.
- For a manually created application with synthetic monitoring enabled, the Synthetic Health tab opens by default.
- For an automatically discovered application with synthetic monitoring enabled, the Application View tab opens by default. Click the Synthetic Health tab.

Example of the Synthetic Health tab

Examining the synthetic health of an application

The Synthetic Health tab displays the status of your application's synthetic transactions over 24 hours using a series of tiles. Each tile represents one hour so you can see the hour-by-hour status of your application as a whole, and of each transaction individually.

Examine the synthetic health in the following sections:

Overall Health—The Overall Health section displays the health of your application over the selected 24 hours. It displays the aggregation of the most severe events from any transaction and each tile represents a single hour.
For example, if at least one transaction opened a minor event and the status of all the other transactions is OK over that hour, the Overall Health shows the hour with a minor event.
The Open Events section, to the right of the overall health tiles, displays the number and severity of all events that are currently open.
Current transaction severity— Allows you to filter transactions by current event severity. By default, all severities are filtered. You can select or deselect a severity.
Transactions—The Transactions section displays the health of the transaction based on the events that occurred each hour from any location. The tile color indicates the highest severity that occurred in that hour. For example, between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., if the highest severity for a transaction was Minor with a number of OK severities, the tile color represents the Minor severity.
The Open Events section, to the right of the transaction tiles, displays the number and severity of events that are currently open for that transaction.
Events—The Events section displays information about events on the selected transactions or a selected tile.

You can see the hour-by-hour status for the overall health and for each transaction:

Tile color—The color of a tile represents the highest severity of an event that opened during that hour.
When you view the last 24 hours, the right-most tile is automatically updated every minute.

The following table describes the severity of the tiles.

Event severity of tiles

Severity	Description
Critical (red)	One or more executed transactions opened a critical event. Minor events might have been opened during the hour, too.
Minor (orange)	One or more executed transactions opened a minor event. No critical events were opened.
OK (green)	One or more executed transactions did not open an event.
No data (gray)	No data was collected, or no transactions were executed during the hour.

Underscored tiles—An underscore is displayed in a tile if an event opens in a previous hour, and it is still open at the beginning of the following hour. For example:
- A minor event opened in the previous hour. The event is still open at the beginning of the following hour, but no transactions ran in the following hour.
- A critical event opened in the previous hour. The event is still open at the beginning of the following hour. The transaction ran in the following hour and a new event opened with minor severity.

Filtering synthetic health events to pinpoint the time and severity of application issues

On the Synthetic Health tab, you can filter the events opened on your synthetic transactions. Filters at the top of the page influence the results shown below the filter.

The following filters are available.

Description of synthetic health filter

Filter	Description
Date	By default, the Synthetic Health tab displays the health over the last 24 hours. From the Date action menu, select a specific date to display in synthetic health.
Overall Health, tiles	Select a tile in the Overall Health section to see the events related to that hour. You can further filter the events list by selecting or clearing one or more transactions.
Current transaction severity	To filter by the current transaction severity, click one of the severity options (Critical, Minor, or OK) above the list of transactions. By default, all severity options are selected. The number on each severity indicates the number of transactions with open events of that severity. Even if you select a different date, the severity buttons always reflect the number and severity of the current events. If you select a severity, all the transactions from that particular severity are included in the displayed list. If you deselect a severity all the transactions from that particular severity are removed from the displayed list.
Transaction	Select or clear transactions to further filter the Events section. Click a transaction name to go to the transaction analysis page where you can analyze a synthetic transaction. Each transaction name includes the name of its Execution Plan: executionPlanName - transactionName. If an execution of the transaction failed, the name displayed is N/A. The Execution Plan name appears as expected. If any other transaction error occurs, the specific error details are displayed. If you examine data from an Execution Plan that has been removed, the word (Deleted) is displayed at the beginning of the name. Such transactions are displayed for 24 hours after the deletion and then they are removed. The transactions are ordered by the most open critical events, followed by the most open minor events. The first four transactions are displayed; click Show more to examine the rest. When all the transactions are displayed, click Show less to collapse down to four transactions. Transaction tiles - You can select a tile to evaluate the events for the specific transaction during the specific hour.

Note

This note applies in a scenario where a single transaction has multiple events with varied severity status or if there are closed events. If you try to filter out transactions with minor open events, and you show critical open events, you might still see minor events in the Events table. The minor events can be earlier events, from before the transaction severity reached the critical severity.

Examining the event summary for selected transactions

Examine the Events section to see a summary of events for selected transactions and delve deeper into the issues impacting your transactions.

If a transaction filter is applied, a funnel icon and description are displayed.

Events table filtered by selected transactions

Events table filtered by selected tile

By default, closed events are not displayed in the Events table; select Show closed events to see them.

By default, the events are sorted by severity and then by start time, with the most recently opened event at the top of the list.

Note

An event is updated in the Synthetic Health view when its severity changes.

Data displayed in the Events section

Column	Description
Event action menu	Displayed only if an event is open You can select Close Event.
Violation Frequency	Number of impacted execution cycles as a ratio of the number of total execution cycles, for example 4/10 Click the violation frequency to analyze synthetic health event details.
Metrics	Name of the metric that breached the defined threshold If more than one metric breached the defined thresholds, Multiple is displayed.
Impacted Locations	Number of locations that were impacted by the event If only one location was impacted, the name of the location is displayed.
Metric Rule	Name of the synthetic metric rule with the defined conditions that opened the event View or edit the metric rule.
Transaction	Name of the transaction on which the event was opened The transaction name includes the name of its Execution Plan: executionPlanName - transactionName. Click the transaction name to analyze the synthetic health details for that transaction.
Start Time	Time and date that the event opened If an event opened earlier than the selected time and date, click the start time to go to the time when the event opened.
Current Status	Current status (open or closed) of the event If closed, the time and date that the event closed are displayed.

Where to go from here

After you examine the overall health of your application and transactions, perform one of the following actions to further examine issues in your application:

Click a transaction name to analyze the synthetic health of that transaction.
Click a violation frequency to analyze synthetic health event details.
If necessary, adjust synthetic metric rules to better reflect the critical data you need for your environment.