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.

Synthetic Monitoring video

The following video gives a brief overview on how to use TrueSight Synthetic Monitor.

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
Impacted Users or Executions: Displays the number of impacted real users compared to the total number of users, or the number of impacted synthetic executions compared to the total number of executions, over the last 24 hours
Application Health - Synthetic: Displays key performance indicators for applications with synthetic executions that are monitored by App Visibility Manager
Applications Overview- Synthetic: Displays the overall performance 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.

Application View

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 represents the aggregated performance of the application's synthetic executions. Click the Synthetic Tier icon to see a grouping of the Execution Plans by status.

Synthetic Member summary.PNG

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

Exec Plans by status.png

Select one or more Execution Plans to see more details about the Execution Plans.

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.

Locations View.png

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.