Analyzing business transactions

Analyze business transactions to locate transaction entry points that are slow or have errors and that could be impacting your users.

The business transactions table displays aggregation statistics for various application entry points. For databases, the business transactions table shows the transactions that queried the selected database.

App Visibility monitors the requests by several types of technologies, including the following kinds of requests:

HTTP and HTTPS requests to a Web tier or outbound requests from Web or Business tiers to external services
Java Message Service (JMS) message tracing
Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) remote invocation through RMI, COBRA, or WebLogic T3 (Note that EJB2 applications running on WebSphere Application Server 7 are not supported.)

By default, the business transactions table displays transactions that have occurred in the selected five minutes, sorted in descending order according to the maximum duration.

This topic describes the contents of the business transactions table, which you can see after drilling down from Web and Business tiers, or from the Database tier. Data is displayed in the business transactions table according to the selected filters.

Business transaction table

The following table describes the contents of each column.

Contents of the business transaction table

Filtering business transactions

After you drill down to business transactions from a Web or Business tier, the transactions are automatically filtered by the selected application server and five-minute range from the Application View. After you drill down from the Database tier, the business transactions table shows the transactions that queried the selected database during the five-minute range from the Application View.

You can adjust the filters to locate the transactions that you want to analyze. Use one or more of the following filters:

To filter by transaction name
To filter by all monitored application servers
To filter by transaction summaries

To change the time range

Click the action menu next to the currently selected time range.
Select a predefined time range from the menu, or select Customize to enter a different time range.
If you select Customize, select a Start time and an End time, and click Done.
Ensure that the start time is earlier than the end time.

The time range is modified, and the displayed data reflects the change in the time range.

The collected data and metrics are recalculated and updated every five minutes.

To filter by transaction name

To filter by transaction name, enter text in the search box to the right of the time filter.

To filter by all monitored application servers

To remove the application server filter, and see captured business transactions for all the monitored application servers in the selected time, click the close icon next to the server filter.

When you drill down further, the server filter applies to the subsequent pages: Traces and Trace Details. Likewise, if you remove the server filter from the Business Transactions page, the subsequent pages are not filtered by server.

To filter by transaction summaries

The summary filter enables you to quickly see the problematic transactions in the defined time range.

Click the relevant summary box to display all transactions, or to display only the transactions that have latency violations or errors.

Example

Summary filter example

You can filter transactions in the following ways:

Click Latency Violations to see the transactions that exceeded the defined performance thresholds.
Click Errors to show the transactions with errors that exceeded the defined availability thresholds.
Click both summary filters to see all transactions that have latency violations, errors, or both.

Navigating the interface

Move between pages of the Application Monitoring and Application View interface.

To return to the Application page, click the arrow next to the page Application Monitoring title.
To move up from the drill-down pages of the Application View, click a breadcrumb title. For example, to move from the Business Transactions page to the Application View page, click the title. Likewise, after you drill-down to Traces and Trace Details, you can easily move back using the breadcrumb titles.

Navigation elements in the Application Monitoring page

Where to go from here

Review the trace list for a selection