Investigating problems with Web and Business tiers
The Web and Business tiers in the Application View provide a visual indication about problems with the performance and availability of application server, compared to the set Minor and Critical thresholds. This topic describes the information presented on the Web and Business tiers (also known as presentation and logic tiers) and how you can use this information to identify performance and availability problems in your application.
The assignment of an application server as a Web or Business tier depends how the App Visibility agent recognizes most of the transactions on the server:
- Web: A monitored server where most transactions are Transaction-type requests, that is, the server is the first to receive transaction requests within an application. For example, a web server that mostly receives end-user transaction requests, or a server that mostly receives requests from a non-monitored component (such as a PHP server), is recognized as a Web tier.
- Business: A monitored server where most transactions are Request-type requests, that is, the server receives most requests from a monitored server.
For information about transaction types, see Analyzing-business-transactions.
This topic presents the following information about the application servers tiers:
Before you begin
To perform this procedure, you must have Application Operator-level access, or higher.
Determine if the application has problems in the Web or Business tiers
In the Application View, the Web and Business tiers display the number of servers that have one or more transaction problems (latency violations or errors) during the selected period. The tiers display the following information:
- Impacted Servers (number inside the circle). Number of impacted application servers
- Colored part of the circle. Ratio of impacted application servers to total number of servers. The color reflects whether the percentage of servers experiencing issues exceeds the defined thresholds.
- Hits per second. Number of hits handled by the servers per second. The type of hit depends on the type of application server, for example, HTTP requests received by a web server, or messages received by a messaging server.
The following example describes the information in the Web and Business tiers:
For the five-minute period reflected in the example, the Web tier shows that the combined hit rate of all the servers in the tier is one hit per second. The Business tier shows ten hits per second. Three web servers are impacted, that is, three servers have latency violations, errors, or server metric violations. Three servers is a little more than half of the number of web servers in the tier. One business server is impacted, representing half of the servers in the Business tier.
To analyze application problems from the Web or Business tier
- On the Application View tab of the Application Details page, position the time slider to select a five-minute period of interest.
- Click the Web or Business tier to display the application servers that were active in the time period.
Example of the Tier Members and Selection Details
In the Tier Members section of the page, click a filter to show or hide application servers with the selected status.
Filters for servers with Critical and Minor events are selected by default to show the servers with detected issues.
Evaluating details of selected servers
Click a server name to select the server (or to clear the selection) and examine details about problems with the servers.
For selected servers, the following details are displayed:
Overall issues in the Summary tab
On the Summary tab, you can compare relative values for selected servers. For example, you might want to examine the server with the largest number of hits per second, or with the greatest percentage of latency violations.
For selected servers, the following details are displayed on the Summary tab, below the Tier Members section. Click a column heading to sort entries by that category.
Column | Description |
|---|---|
Action menu | Select Show Business Transactions to examine transaction details |
Severity icon | Representation of the severity level of events on the server |
Application Server Name | Name of the application server |
Hits/Sec | Estimated number of requests sent to the servers per second Variations in the reported metrics might occur between the values in the tier box and the total of tier members because of the way fractional results are calculated. |
Impacted Transactions | Percentage of transaction on the server with latency violations or errors that exceed defined thresholds |
Latency Violations | Percentage of transactions on the server with latency violations |
Errors | Percentage of transactions on the server with errors |
Specific problems in the Problems tab
Click the Problems tab to examine the types of problems on the selected servers.
For selected servers, the following details are displayed on the Problems tab. Click a column heading to sort entries by that category.
Column | Description |
|---|---|
Severity icon | Representation of the problem severity level The severity level remains unchanged until all transaction and server problems of that level are closed. |
Problem | Brief problem description, such as Transaction latency on the server and Transactions with error on the server, or a brief description of a server metric problem (for example, CPU usage, Memory usage, and Thread count) |
Application Server Name | Name of the application server |
Problem Started | Time and date that the problem started which caused the displayed severity 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 | For application server metrics, the value of the threshold that was crossed For transactions, which represent an aggregation of entry points, the threshold value is not applicable (N/A). For a list of default threshold values, see Application-metrics-and-problems. To view the transaction thresholds, see Viewing-event-thresholds-SLAs-of-applications. |
Current Status | Open or Closed, which represents the current status of the problem, and time in which the problem was resolved, if applicable |
Where to go from here
Analyzing-business-transactions
Related topics
Setting-up-applications-for-monitoring
Analyzing-end-user-experience-with-the-User-tier
Analyzing-database-problems-with-the-Database-tier
Monitoring-synthetic-transactions-in-the-Synthetic-tier