Analyzing application server problems with the Web, App, and Business tiers

Web, App, and Business tiers provide a visual indication about the page performance and availability compared to configured Warning and Critical thresholds. This topic describes how to use the tiers to identify performance and availability problems in your application.

• • To analyze application server problems with the Web, App, or Business tier
  • Application tier description
  • Application problem severity
  • Application server metrics
  • Related topics

To analyze application server problems with the Web, App, or Business tier

1. Click the Web, App, or Business tier box to display the application servers that were active in the selected five-minute period.
   The application servers are displayed below the Application View.
2. To drill down to more details, select an option from the shortcut menu on an application server member:
   • Business Transactions View—examine business transactions for the selected application server, filtered for the five-minute period.
     
   • Application Servers View—examine application server metrics, filtered for the five-minute period.  
3. Select one or more application servers to examine the Problems report or view graphs of server Metrics.
   The Problems tab and the Metrics tab are displayed below the application server members.

Application tier description

The following table describes the meaning of the values and colors for Web, App, and Business tiers:

Application tier description

Attribute	Description
Color and status	The following colors and status messages are displayed for the selected five-minute period: Blue (No Data). No data was collected, or no application servers were associated with the tier Green (No Problems). Application servers that are associated with the tier did not have any metrics which exceed defined thresholds Orange (Warning). At least one application server that is associated with the tier had at least one metric that exceeded the defined Warning threshold  Red (Critical). At least one application server that is associated with the tier had at least one metric that exceeded the defined Critical threshold
Hit Rate	Total number of requests per second sent to the servers
Success Rate	Percentage of transactions that completed without latency violations or errors

Example Application tier

For the five-minute period reflected in the example, the Application tier shows that the combined hit rate of all the application servers in the tier is 12 hits per second. The success rate, that is, the percentage of transactions completed without latency violations or error violations, is 90%.

Select a tier to examine its members.

Example Application tier members

For the five-minute period reflected in the example, the application server on the right is selected. Each application server member shows the following information:

• Hit Rate—number of hits per second
• Success Rate—percentage of transactions that completed without latency violation, error, or both
• Latency Violations—percentage of transactions that exceeded the latency threshold
• Error Violations—percentage of transactions with error

From the shortcut menu, you can drill down to business transactions or application servers, filtered for the set time in the Application View.

Application problem severity

To analyze the problem severity of an application server, click one or more the server members, and click the Problems tab (below the server members).

The Problems report lists the problems in the selected server in decreasing order by severity. You can change the order of problems in the report by clicking any of the column headings. The Problems report provides the following information for each page:

• Severity of the problem, according to the severity level of the threshold
  
• Name of the problem threshold that was breached. If the problem is associated with a server metric, click the problem name to go directly to the metrics graph.
• Percentage value that exceeded the percentage threshold
• Time and date the problem started. If the problem started earlier than the display 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.
• Application server display name
• Current status of the problem and the time and date that the status was achieved

Problems that have the Critical status are listed first, followed by issues with the Warning status.  

Application server metrics

To view metrics about a specific application server, click one or more the server members, and click the Metrics tab (below the server members). Graphs of server metric performance over a 24-hour period are displayed. For details about the metrics, see Application server metrics.

Related topics

Application-server-events

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