Defining Watchpoints for applications monitoring

To monitor the performance of your web applications dynamically, you must configure Application Watchpoints. You can also add child Watchpoints to every Application Watchpoint, to monitor the additional metrics of the application's traffic, such as geographic location, operating system and browser information, number of errors, ad so on. See the following figure:

Application Watchpoint and its child Watchpoints

To create an Application Watchpoint

1. In the BMC Application Performance Management Console, click Application Monitoring, point to Watchpoints, and then click Application Watchpoints.

   Note

   The Uncategorized Watchpoints page lists the Watchpoints that were created on the connected Analyzers. These Watchpoints cannot be moved to the Application Watchpoints page.

2. On the Action menu, click Monitor new applications.
   You can see the list of all applications that are not yet monitored by the Application Watchpoints. By default, the applications are sorted by the amount of web traffic coming to and from them.

   Note

   The applications that are already monitored by the Application Watchpoints, do not appear in this list (until you delete their associated Watchpoints).

3. Click Monitor corresponding to the application that you want the Watchpoint to monitor.
4. Provide a name for the Watchpoint, or leave the default name which is automatically populated with the application name.
5. (Optional) Provide a description for the Watchpoint.
6. (Optional) In the Service Level Threshold  section, specify one of the available latency metrics and the threshold for it (in milliseconds):
   • Host time
   • End-to-end time
   • Page-render time
     
     The Watchpoint will monitor the performance of your application based on this metric. If your traffic data violates the threshold you set for this metric, you will see this reflected in reports marked with red. See Configuring-a-page-SLT-by-specific-Watchpoint.
7. In the Services section, select the types of incident-detection rules that you want the system to create for this Watchpoint:
   • Availability
   • Performance
   • Volume
     
     The system will monitor these metrics for the Watchpoint and report incidents accordingly.
8. Click Save.

As a result, the system creates the following artifacts:

• A Watchpoint for monitoring the application. The Application Watchpoint appears on the Application Monitoring > Watchpoints > Application Watchpoints page of the Console.
• A page SLT for this Watchpoint, based on the metric that you selected in the Service Level Threshold section
• Incident-detection rules based on what you selected in the Services section

To create a child Watchpoint

1. In the BMC Application Performance Management Console, point to Application Monitoring > Watchpoints, and click Application Watchpoints.
2. For the Application Watchpoint that you want to extend with child Watchpoints, click the button and click Add child Watchpoint.
3. Provide a name for the child Watchpoint, for example, Dial-up connections.
4. (Optional) Provide a description for the Watchpoint, for example Connections with very low throughput, similar to dial-up.

5. Define the incoming and outgoing traffic for the application specified in the parent Watchpoint by typing a filter query into the Filter field. For example:
   
   

   (first_public_geo.city is "New York") AND (slt_broken is true) AND (err_count between 3 10)

    

   Alternatively, you can use the Expression Builder to automate the query building:
   

   1. Select a filter criteria, for example, Geolocation City.
   2. Specify a condition for the criteria, for example, is.

   3. Provide a value (or values, for conditions that require you to specify more than one value) for example, "New York".
      The system will hint you on the valid format for the value. See Filter-expressions-reference.
      You can find values for all the criteria in the Real User Analyzer's Reference lists tab:

      Analyzer's Reference lists tab
      
      

   4. Click Add Expression.
      The system adds expression to the Filter box. All the consecutive expressions will have the AND relation to the existing ones, but you can also use OR and NOT logical operators.
      
      

      Note

      Filters support multinational character encoding.

   5. Repeat steps 1 – 4 until the expression defines the traffic segment that you want to monitor.
      
      Building queries with Expression Builder
      
      
      
      

      Note

      You can also modify the query manually.

6. In the Services section, select the types of incident-detection rules that you want the system to create for this Watchpoint:
   • Availability
   • Performance
   • Volume
     
     The system now monitors traffic to the parent application that is coming from the dial-up connections and reports incidents accordingly.
7. Click Save.

Where to go from here

After you set up the hierarchy of Application Watchpoints, proceed to monitoring the performance of these applications with performance dashlets.

Related topics

Filter-expressions-reference
Using the Watchpoint Summary
Using-dashboards-and-dashlets
Page-service-level-thresholds
Incident-detection-rules