Using AppOptics APM
AppOptics APM consists of two main parts: performance metrics gathered from the different services powering your application, and distributed traces that follow the path of individual transactions through the entire application stack. Using AppOptics APM, you can pivot easily between application metrics, traces, infrastructure metrics, and custom data to quickly solve performance problems.
AppOptics application performance monitoring and distributed tracing data is gathered by agents deployed in your application stack. These agents require no manual instrumentation or configuration to get started–learn more by picking one from the left-hand navigation menu.
Services
Services are the basic unit of observability data grouping in AppOptics APM. When you first navigate to the APM section of AppOptics you are presented with a list of services automatically detected by the APM agents you have instrumented, as well as their key performance metrics:
Service Overview
Select a particular service to be taken to the Service Overview page. AppOptics shows the current state of an application compared to a prior period such as one week ago. This puts the signals in context and makes it easy to see issues such as the error rate being 50% higher than this same time last week.
The average response time and average error rates shown in the chart headers are calculated based on the total number of requests sent during the time period represented in the chart. These charts plot the response times and error rates over time and do not visually indicate the number of requests sent at any point in time, so average values shown in chart headers may be higher or lower than previously anticipated when looking at the values plotted on the chart.
To calculate the average response time and average error rates yourself, divide the sum of your response times or error rates by the total number of responses sent.
AppOptics will automatically evaluate service metrics and provide a simple explanation that pinpoints the highest source of latency. Is the service spending most of the time in a particular codebase? Is there a single host that's running slower than the rest? The problem will be spelled out in the form of a notification at the top of the page.
Service Details
This tab displays a number of charts that provide an overview of the application's performance such as response times, HTTP calls, and service transactions.
From the Service Details, you can drill down on an individual aspects of a service's performance to understand by-transaction performance; review database, cache, and remote service usage; and inspect transaction traces that involved requests to this service.
The charts on this page can also display annotation streams related to your service. To visualize events such as application deployments, POST annotations using our API to the /annotations/<service-name> endpoint.
Navigation Notice: When the APM Integrated Experience is enabled, AppOptics shares a common navigation and enhanced feature set with other integrated experience products. How you navigate AppOptics and access its features may vary from these instructions.