dynaTrace Transaction Management - Overview

In this blog I will try to answer folowing two questions from dynaTrace transaction management perspective -

1) How do dynaTrace follow every single click of user on an application?

2) How can we follow the dynaTrace transaction path and look for performance issues and reasons?

dynaTrace has the ability to track the interaction of user with the application. dynaTrace achieve this by using an agent based solution. It has agents support for Java,.net and PHP right now ,while Ruby, python agents support is in work right now. 

dynaTrace tracks every single user click. When user interacts with the application all the agents work in conjunction to stitch together user interaction across multiple tiers called pure path. The agents collects specific information about the transaction and send it to data base server. Server analyses all the data and put it as single user action. User action can be running a java script or download a file etc etc.

We can use dynaTrace to analyze all the transactions of every single user and can figure out the issue in any business process. We can export this transaction session and send it to developer who can analyze the transaction from the individual user perspective and find out how user performed that transaction flow. 

This enables developer to analyze and fix responsibilities for fixing the issue.

For example while analyzing the particular transaction developer can look for which search parameter the user used or which SQL query was executed for the parameter. These kind of granular details can help triage better and optimize systems better.

Lets see how this works –

We are at the dynaTrace application dashboard from where we can have the high level monitoring of the applications.

If we have any issues in any of application under test/production performance parameters we will see something gone red at this dashboard.

Example if we have any issue with any of our machines (hosts) somewhere in the transaction flow we will see “System Health” section in red. To find out what is wrong we can click on this particular space on dashboard which will directly land us on the host dashboard which will give us the high level details of what’s wrong with any of the hosts on transaction path.

On the right side of the dashboard we can see the CPU and Memory status of the host, and also the Processes and Applications associated with this host.

Further we can click on any of the processes attached to this host shown on the right side of the dash board to get the high level details attached to that process. Here we can see from this process’s context, if there is some CPU, threads , GC or a Memory issue.

Now on the above screen we have the diagnostics tools available. For example if you see a GC issue and want to see GC dumps just click on “Thread dumps” and we can land right there. No need to go to command prompt and find the dumps using old fashioned ways.

Note - dynaTrace can show if you have network latency but dynaTrace do not allow you to drill down why is there network latency?

Now to dive into a particular business transaction which have some issues. We need to click on that particular business transaction on the application dashboard.

Example as below if we have issue with logins we can click on the "login" transaction and we will land on the transaction flow page of the "login" transaction. This page view show us the transaction mapping across the system architecture.

Note - "login" transaction name is just a generalization, you may have some other transaction name for this business transaction like "Log on", "Get me started", or something else.

If we hover on any of the hop in the transaction flow we can drill down to the different metrics which we have seen above too.

At any point hardware or software or database related drill down can done easily and quickly by clicking on that particular item in the transaction flow.

At any point if every thing looks good and there is no red line coming up on the screen but any user is experiencing a performance issue then we can also search that particular user (with session id or user id according to your application setup) and find out in detail its interaction with the system. This user specific drill down is very useful to single out the exceptional issues with any particular set of configuration or data.

dynaTrace will highlight  all the interactions of this user as follows. There will be details of all the user actions exactly the way user interacted with the application.

These are the actual activities performed by this user not any aggregate values or something else.

We can further drill down the user action for different details and get to the most granular details of sub actions performed.

If we see any error or some issues in the drilled down view we can export the details and share it with the developer or Application support people. So these teams have the same level of details as we have.

They can directly get the required details with minimum explanations and reproduction of issue.

They also know the user flow till the error or exception occurred.