Application performance monitoring (APM)
Use APM to gather performance metrics from the services powering your application and create distributed traces that follow the path of individual transactions through the entire application stack. The APM metrics cover key performance indicators like latency (request duration, percentiles, etc), error rate, per-host and per-transaction metrics, etc. Distributed tracing follows the path of requests through your entire application: across RPC calls, through queues, and more.
This data provides insight into database, cache, and remote service usage, as well as the performance of each transaction. You can also inspect transaction traces that involved requests to the monitored service. Trace context can be added, providing the ability to correlate application log messages from a traced transaction, and if sampled, the log messages to the transaction trace detail. See Trace context in logs.
APM allows you to identify the root cause of slowness or errors in your application. You can determine if the service you're monitoring is spending most of the time in a particular codebase, or if there is a single host that's running slower than the rest.
Monitor a service in SolarWinds Observability
To monitor an application's services, deploy the APM library that uses the same language as the application in your application stack. Use a Service key to connect the library to your SolarWinds Observability organization. While these libraries require no manual instrumentation or configuration to get started, there are advanced options available to customize the metrics you monitor and to deploy traces that fit your specific needs. There are also SDKs for each language to further enhance your monitoring options and enable you to monitor using alternative frameworks. See Add a service.
Use the APM area overview to view metric data gathered from all services powering your application.
Use the Entity Explorer to view a list of your observed services. You can view the metric data collected about your service's health and performance in widgets in the service entity's Overview tab.
You can review your service's performance metrics can be reviewed in the Metrics Explorer and find the highest sources of latency in the Traces Explorer.
Services widgets
In addition to standard visualizations of metric data, the following widgets provide detailed insights into your services and their transactions, spans, and errors.
Details
On the Overview tab, the Details widget shows the service ID, APM Library Version, total number of exceptions, Kubernetes cluster and deployment IDs, and more.
The service ID is also known as the service name, which is used in defining the service's service key. Editing the display name of the service entity does not affect the service ID or the service key.
Response Time Breakdown
The Response Time Breakdown widget shows how much of the total response time was spent in each part of the system, including application execution, remote calls, and database queries.
HTTP Status Codes
The HTTP Status Codes widget shows the status codes issued in response to the selected requests. Status codes are classified by the first number in the code:
- 1xx: Informational
- 2xx: Successful
- 3xx: Redirection
- 4xx: Client error
- 5xx: Server error
Error Ratio
The Error Ratio widget shows the average error ratio for the selected time period and the percentage of increase or decrease from the previous time period. The line graph shows the error ratio values recorded over the selected time period.
The error ratio is the percentage of requests that result in an error. It includes all errors, not only unhandled errors.
Request Rate
The Request Rate widget shows the average request rate for the selected time period and the percentage of increase or decrease from the previous time period. The line graph shows the request rate values recorded over the selected time period
The request rate is the number of requests completed per second.
Related Hosts Health
The Related Hosts Health widget shows the average health of all hosts that are related to the selected service(s) and are also being observed by SolarWinds Observability. Use this information to determine if problems with a related host could be affecting the performance of the selected service(s).
Related Services Health
The Related Services Health widget shows the average health of all services that are related to the selected service(s) and are also being observed by SolarWinds Observability. Use this information to determine if problems with a related service could be affecting the performance of the selected service(s).
Related Websites Health
The Related Websites Health widget shows the average health of all websites that are related to the selected service(s) and are also being observed by SolarWinds Observability. Use this information to determine if problems with a related website could be affecting the performance of the selected service(s).
Top 5 Transactions by Total Time
The Top 5 Transactions by Total Time widget shows the five transactions that have the highest total times. For each transaction, the chart lists the total time during the selected time period, the total time for the previous time period, and the percentage of change. Click a transaction name to open the details view for that transaction.
Top 5 Transactions by Error Ratio
The Top 5 Transactions by Error Ratio widget shows the five transactions that have the highest percentage of requests that result in an error. For each transaction, the chart lists the error ratio during the selected time period, the error ratio for the previous time period, and the percentage of change. Click a transaction name to open the details view for that transaction.