Getting Started with SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience

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This guide will provide you with the steps to get your hands on a fully functional implementation of the SolarWinds Advanced Performance Monitor. Along with this, it contains information about how to set up and configure an installation for APM and some best practices tips that can help make your experience more streamlined.

The “solarwinds appman” is a command-line tool that allows users to download, install, and manage SolarWinds APM. The tool can be used in the terminal or through the GUI.

Getting Started with SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience

Monitoring is one of the most common duties that any IT worker must do. After all, IT operations personnel are paid to ensure that services are always up and running for customers. What good is it to put up the freshest and best services for your consumers if you can’t keep them online?

Thousands of important services might exist in large organizations and corporations, each serving a distinct purpose. The days of peering up at a data center’s wall TV for red and green lights are long gone. The number of services has grown, and a binary up/down approach is no longer acceptable.

SolarWinds is the sponsor of this article. Learn more about the SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience or sign up for a free trial.

An Onion is a kind of application stack.

In the end, the most essential indicator of whether a service is “up” or “down” is the user experience. However, this necessity brings with it a whole new set of difficulties. Organizations must ensure that every tier of the application stack is adequately monitored in order to achieve this. The application stack is similar to that of an onion. After peeling back one layer, you’ll discover another.

You’re no longer tracking a basic measure like a lost ICMP packet intended for a server. Instead, you’re now keeping an eye on the onion, which is made up of the full OSI model stack!

Who is in charge of the manager?

For years, organizations have relied on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring technologies to deal with the intricacies of today’s monitoring issues. However, another issue arises: managing the connections between the tools (and teams).

Assume a user contacts the helpdesk to request a support ticket because they are unable to access a crucial business online service. Server A runs that service on an Apache webserver, according to the helpdesk tech. He notices that Server A’s web service is not operating when he uses the infrastructure monitoring tool. When he tries to start it, it instantly stops.

  • Is the server instance itself having issues?
  • Is there a problem with the Apache web configuration?
  • Is it possible that the development team unintentionally introduced a bug that causes Apache to shut down?

The helpdesk technician is completely unaware. The ticket is then distributed to five teams, each of which has its own monitoring mechanisms set up to guarantee that functionality in their particular domain is operational.

Getting-Started-with-SolarWinds-APM-Integrated-Experience

After many days, the ticket is sent to development, where it is discovered that the problem was caused by a minor code change in a method that was assumed to be infrequently used. The ticket is closed when new code is submitted to Server A.

Sure, the issue has been resolved, but at what cost? It took days and numerous teams to figure out what was causing the problem. Multiple teams manage just a single layer of an application stack, which might be rather deep.

We have an issue with team and tool sprawl. Aside from that, each tool just watches over its own domain. Why do we just monitor each layer of the stack when all we care about is the user experience? The SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience comes in handy here.

The SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience is now available.

A fantastic user experience does not originate from a single source, as previously said. Applications operating on infrastructure with numerous components in between give a wonderful experience.

Operators in the SolarWinds ecosystem use:

  • Infrastructure and application monitoring using AppOptics
  • Pingdom is a user-based monitoring service.
  • Loggly is a log management and analytics application.

All three of these techniques work together to help firms provide excellent customer service. They do, however, have one flaw: they are all focused on a particular topic. A user experience is a broad term that encompasses all of these technologies. That umbrella is APM Integrated Experience.

The SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience combines several popular SolarWinds tools into an one package. It enables you to follow down relationships and drill down to a single line in a cryptic log file.

Taking Advantage of the APM Integrated Experience

Let’s have a look at a demo that highlights some of APM Integrated Experience’s capabilities now that you know where it fits into the monitoring and observability ecosystem.

Production settings are not for tinkering with or taking for granted. However, in order to give your customers with greater value, you must regularly provide new features, bug patches, and even new apps.

Assume you’re adding a new functionality to your application’s booking service. This service is crucial to your company and operates on a web tier. The support center starts getting calls from unhappy users as soon as the upgrade to the booking service is rolled out.

You must resolve this issue with the booking service functionality as soon as possible.

1. Perform a transaction audit.

Navigate to the Transaction Check Test page in the SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience by selecting Synthetics and then Transactions from the dropdown menu.

The Transactions report gives detailed information on the individual transactions that your application processes.

Report on APM's Integrated Experience TransactionsReport on APM’s Integrated Experience Transactions

To replicate an actual user interaction experience, click the Run Test button to start a new test. To replicate genuine user behaviors, this test will break down transactions into phases such as filling in text fields, ticking boxes, and clicking buttons.

The Transaction Check test simulates typical user behaviors and assesses transaction performance in real time. This step-by-step procedure offers you a sense of what the user is going through and provides red/green visual indications as to where a possible issue may be.

The #9 transaction has failed in this sample check. Something unexpected occurred when the test activated the #breakfastpjd checkbox for some reason. Let’s see what went wrong here.

Report on failed transactionsReport on failed transactions

2. Look into the Service

It’s time to dive further and analyze the service after you’ve determined where the transaction is failing. Perhaps the transaction check in the booking service failed. The booking service and the web tier hosting that service are both highlighted in red, suggesting a problem.

APM Integrated Experience's service topology mapThe service topology map of APM Integrated Experience

Now go to Services and you’ll see that the service isn’t working. The Average Response Time and Requests Rate are both increasing.

Metrics for customer serviceMetrics for customer service

Click on Traced Requests to learn more. This useful tool shows activity on a timeline as a heat map.

When you click on a transaction outlier on the heat map, you’ll see that there are too many database calls. This is visible in the Request Duration box, which separates local code execution from database calls.

The APM Integrated Experience additionally displays a warning showing that database calls have consumed 69 percent of the overall request time, as seen below.

The response time is being slowed by a large number of database requests.The response time is being slowed by a large number of database requests.

3. Use logs to be more specific.

You now know there’s a database issue, but what is it? You’ll have to dig a little further and check the logs.

  1. To learn more about what’s going on, go to Logs in the left-hand window.
  2. Now go through the logs for the trace ID you recorded previously. You now have a better understanding of the issue and how to resolve it.

Viewing logs in the APM Integrated ExperienceViewing logs in the APM Integrated Experience

4. Make corrections, double-check, and keep an eye on things.

Now that you know what went wrong, you can fix the code. Run another transaction test after that to ensure the transaction is no longer failing. The database is no longer approaching a warning level, according to this check.

You know you’ve addressed the problem if the previously failed transaction is now green.

An problem with the application has been resolved.An problem with the application has been resolved.

Finally, you now know that this might become an issue in the future and that you need keep an eye on it. Set a monitor to regularly evaluate the application’s performance to be alerted of any future difficulties to guarantee the problem doesn’t occur again!

Conclusion

The APM Integrated Experience equips you with the resources you need to keep digging. You may go from duplicating the precise fault to identifying the failed service down to a single line of a log causing the issue.

The APM Integrated Experience eliminates the need to switch between tools. It speeds up the troubleshooting process and, as a result, results in a more happy client!

The “appoptics pricing” is a tool that allows users to monitor their apps and servers. The tool has many features, such as the ability to track app usage, network traffic, and server response time.

Related Tags

  • solarwinds website monitoring
  • loggly trial
  • solarwinds rum
  • pingdom
  • loggly documentation

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