Creating custom discovery rules for business transactions in AppDynamics

1. AppDynamics Webinars:
Advanced BT Configuration
Todd Radel, Senior Manager – Customer Advocacy

2. Agenda
• Why is BT configuration important?
• Creating custom BT rules and exclude rules
• Using “BT lockdown” (new since 4.0)
• Using “BT discovery tool” (new since 4.1)
• Office hours

3. WHY IS BT CONFIGURATION
IMPORTANT?

4. Why is it important to configure business
transactions?
• Faster and easier to find the code causing problems if your
BTs are organized nicely
• Metrics are computed per BT
• Baselines are computed per BT
• Health Rules alert on a particular BT

5. Default BT discovery rules
• Where is “rent
a movie”?
• Where is “pay
for a movie”?
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6. Simple customizations
• Changing the default
naming rules
• Deleting or excluding BT’s
one at a time
• Renaming
• Grouping
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7. Advanced customization
• Creating your own custom rules
• Splitting BT’s by URL, parameter, or payload
• Using exclude rules
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8. “The more effort you put into
configuring Business Transactions,
the more AppDynamics will help you.”
– Todd Radel, 2012
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9. CREATING CUSTOM BT RULES

10. Use cases
• Excluding all pages that match a certain pattern
• Naming BT’s based on parameters or payload
– Part of the URL (by segment or regex)
– GET or POST parameters
– Cookies, session variables, header values
– XML or JSON payload
– Class name/method name
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11. Movieztream example
• Search form with several different search types:
– By movie title
– By category
– By year released
• Each type follows a different code path
• How do I create separate BT’s for each search type?
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12. USING BT LOCKDOWN

13. What is “BT lockdown”?
• New feature added in 4.0 (Java and .NET)
• Prevents new BT’s from being registered
• New BT’s will go into “All Other Traffic” instead
• Use the “View Traffic” button to select new BT’s and
promote them to the BT list
• Keeps your BT list clean
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14. Catch-all rules
• Custom rule, priority 20, matches “/movie/search.htm”
• Custom rule, priority 10, matches “/movie”
• Custom rule, priority 0, matches “/”
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15. BT lockdown vs. “catch-all” rules
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Registering new
candidate BT’s
Can be instantly promoted to BT list
Visibility Easy to see what has been excluded
Flexibility All-or-nothing approach
Result Clean BT list + “All Other Traffic”
Must create a higher-priority custom
rule first
Need to inspect snapshots to find out
what has been excluded
Can create “tiers” of catch-all rules
with different levels of specificity
Clean BT list + “Catch-All Bucket”
BT lockdown Catch-all rules

16. USING THE BT DISCOVERY TOOL

17. What is the “BT discovery tool”?
• New feature added in 4.1 (Java only)
• Interactive console to help discover and refine BT’s
• Like a “sandbox”

18. How it improves your workflow
The Old Way
1. Create custom BT rules
2. Generate load
3. Look at discovered BT’s
4. Stop load
5. Delete discovered BT’s
6. Adjust custom BT rules
7. Repeat steps 2-7
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The New Way
1. Start discovery session
2. Generate load
3. Look at discovered BT’s
4. Adjust custom BT rules
5. Click “Apply”

19. FURTHER READING

20. References
• Locking down Business Transactions
• Using the Transaction Discovery Tool
• Custom BT naming rules:
– Java Business Transaction Detection
– Configure Business Transaction Detection for .NET
• Best Practices for Business Transactions
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21. Thank You