Business Transaction Monitoring - Slice and Dice Analytics Report

By default, the Slice and Dice Analytics report provides administrators with an overview of the user experience with a web application, for a given period of time in the past. Besides displaying the total number of transactions that were performed on the chosen web application during the given period, the report also reveals the percentage of transactions that were healthy, slow, and error-prone, thus clearly indicating to administrators if overall user experience with the web application was satisfactory or not. Additionally, the report also allows administrators to easily pick and choose what perspectives to user experience they want to view and analyze in the report. For instance, administrators can choose to focus on slow pages alone, or historically analyze how specific page groups / URLs have performed over time. Likewise, they may need insights on page view requests coming from specific client IP addresses. This report supports such granular/focused analysis as well, so that administrators can view only what they want to in the report, exclude statistics that may distract them, isolate bottlenecks to user experience quickly and precisely, and troubleshoot efficiently.

In order to generate the Slice and Dice Analytics report, do the following:

Follow the menu sequence: REPORTS BY FUNCTION -> Domain-specific Reports -> Web Application Monitoring -> Business Transaction Monitoring -> Slice and Dice Analytics.
Figure 1 then appears. In Figure 1, select a criterion for analysis from the Analyze By list box.

Figure 1 : Specifying the criteria for the Slice and Dice Analytics report
Using this report, you can analyze the performance of one/more managed components, or those that are part of a zone, service or segment. The options provided by the Analyze By list box are discussed hereunder:
- Component: Select this option to choose the component(s) from across all the managed components in the environment.
- Zone: To generate a report for one/more components that are included in a zone, pick the Zone option. A Zone drop-down list will then appear, from which you would have to select the zone to which the components of interest to you belong. A Sub zone flag also appears. Indicate whether the components present within the sub-zones of the chosen zone are also to be to be considered for report generation, by setting the Sub zone flag to Yes.
- Segment: If you want to generate a report for one/more chosen components that belong to a segment, select the Segment option from Analyze By list box, and then pick the Segment from the drop-down list that appears.
- Service: If you want to generate a report for one/more components involved in the delivery of a service, select the Service option from Analyze By, and then pick the required Service from the drop-down list that appears.
Then, select a component type for which you wish to generate the report from the Component Type list.
The Component list will now be populated with all the components that are managed in your environment for the chosen component type. If the Components list consists of too many components, then viewing all the components and selecting the ones you need for report generation could require endless scrolling. To avoid this, you can click the button next to the Components list. A COMPONENTS pop up window will then appear using which you can view almost all the components in a single interface and Select the ones to be included in this report.
Then, specify the Timeline for the graph. You can either provide a fixed time line such as 1 hour, 2 days, etc., or select the Any option from the list to provide a From and To date/time for report generation.

Note:

For every user registered with the eG Enterprise system, the administrator can indicate the maximum timeline for which that user can generate a report. Once the maximum timeline is set for a user, then, whenever that user logs into eG Reporter and attempts to generate a report, the Timeline list box in the report page will display options according to the maximum timeline setting of that user. For instance, if a user can generate a report for a maximum period of 3 days only, then 3 days will be the highest option displayed in the Timeline list - i.e., 3 days will be the last option in the fixed Timeline list. Similarly, if the user chooses the Any option from the Timeline list and proceeds to provide a start date and end date for report generation using the From and To specifications, eG Enterprise will first check if the user's Timeline specification conforms to his/her maximum timeline setting. If not, report generation will fail. For instance, for a user who is allowed to generate reports spanning over a maximum period of 3 days only, the difference between the From and To dates should never be over 3 days. If it is, then, upon clicking the Run Report button a message box will appear, prompting the user to change the From and To specification.
In addition to the settings discussed above, this report comes with a set of default specifications. These settings are hidden by default. If you do not want to disturb these default settings, then you can proceed to generate the report by clicking the Run Report button soon after you pick one/more components for report generation. However, if you want to view and then alter these settings (if required), click on the icon. The default settings will then appear in the MORE OPTIONS drop down window (See Figure 2). The steps below discuss each of these settings and how they can be customized.

Figure 2 : The default settings for generating the report
If the timeline specified for the report needs to exclude the data collected during the Weekends, then set Exclude weekends to Yes. If not, select No.

Note:

By default, the weekend constitutes Saturday and Sunday. To override this default setting, do the following:
- Edit the eg_report.ini file in the <EG_INSTALL_DIR>\manager\config directory.
- In the [EXCLUDE_WEEKEND] section of the file, the Days parameter is set to Saturday,Sunday by default. You can modify this by setting the Days parameter to a comma-separated list of other days of the week - say Friday,Saturday.
- Save the file after making the required changes.
Next, indicate the report Time period.

Note:

By default, the Time period is set to 24 hours. Accordingly, the From and To parameters in the [timeframe] section of the eg_report.ini file (in the <eg_install_dir>\manager\config directory) are set to 00:00 and 24:00 respectively. If need be, you can override this default setting by configuring a different timeframe against the From and/or To parameters.
In large environments, reports generated using months of data can take a long time to complete. Administrators now have the option of generating reports on-line or in the background. When a report is scheduled for background generation, administrators can proceed with their other monitoring, diagnosis, and reporting tasks, while the eG manager is processing the report. This saves the administrator valuable time. To schedule background processing of a report, you can either select the Background Save - PDF option from the Report Generation list. To process reports in the foreground, select the Foreground Generation - HTML option from this list.

Note:
- The Report Generation list will appear only if the EnableBackgroundReport flag in the [BACKGROUND_PROCESS] section of the eg_report.ini file (in the <EG_INSTALL_DIR>\manager\config directory) is set to Yes.
- The default selection in the Report Generation list will change according to the Timeline specified for the report. If the Timeline set is greater than or equal to the number of days specified against the MinDurationForReport parameter in the [BACKGROUND_PROCESS] section of the eg_report.ini file, then the default selection in the Report Generation list will be Background Save - PDF. On the other hand, if the Timeline set for the report is lesser than the value of the MinDurationForReport parameter, then the default selection in the Report Generation list will be Foreground. This is because, the MinDurationForReport setting governs when reports are to be processed in the background. By default, this parameter is set to 2 weeks - this indicates that by default, reports with a timeline of 2 weeks and above will be processed in the background.
Click the Done button if any changes were made to the More Options drop down window.
Finally, click the Run Report button to generate the report.
If the Report type is Foreground Generation - HTML, then Figure 3 will appear as soon as you click the Run Report button.

Figure 3 : The generated Slice and Dice Analytics Report
Clicking on a type of transaction from the REQUEST PROCESSING TIME column of Figure 3 will lead you to Figure 4.

Figure 4 : The Cross Application Transaction flow of the chosen type of transaction
By closely analyzing the transaction flow in Figure 4, administrators can figure out where exactly the problem lies in a chosen slow/stalled/error-prone transaction. From the transaction flow in Figure 4, it is evident that the transaction slowed down on the Microsoft SQL server due to inefficient database queries.
Clicking on the Java Application in Figure 4 will lead you to Figure 5.

Figure 5 : The Execution Analysis of the call

Figure 5 provides a detailed Execution Analysis of the synchronous call. As part of this analysis, a pie chart is presented that quickly reveals the percentage of time the Java application in our example spent processing the server’s Java code and making external database query calls. The table below the pie chart in Figure 5 lists the exact methods that performed Java processing or made the remote calls.

Drilling down from Database Query in Figure 4 automatically opens the list of SQL Queries executed by the slow transaction in question (see Figure 6).

Figure 6 : Analyzing the slow query

The execution time of each query and what percentage of the total response time of the transaction each query is consuming will be displayed here. From Figure 6, it is evident that a INSERT INTO. . . query is taking over 2014 milliseconds for execution – this is apparently 39.08% of the total response time of the target transaction. This time-consuming query is what is causing the transaction to slow down. To view the complete query, click on that query in the SQL Queries list of Figure 6. The detailed query will then be displayed in the Query section of Figure 6.
On the other hand, if the Background Save - PDF option is chosen from the Report Generation list, then clicking on the Run Report button will not generate the report and display it in this page for your benefit. Instead, a message indicating that the report is being processed in the background will appear. This will be accompanied by a link that will lead you to the page that lists all the reports that are being processed in the background, and their current status. If background report generation fails for a report, you can regenerate that report using this page, or can even delete that report if need be. On the other hand, if background processing successfully completes for your report, then, you can view a PDF of the report by clicking on the icon in that page.