Transaction tracking

The transaction tracking feature enables topology views and instance level transaction monitoring. By distributed tracking infrastructure, transaction tracking can detect bottleneck issues including latency problems and errors, and filter or sort traces based on application. Transaction tracking can also filter views based on length of trace, timestamp, interactions, errors and transaction comparisons.

About this task

Transaction tracking is installed as part of the IBM® Cloud App Management server. Transaction tracking gets the transaction data by OpenTracing. By transaction tracking, you can do the following actions:

• Troubleshoot an issue by looking at a specific request flow through the system.
• Quickly identify the bottleneck which caused the bad experience.
• You can select a single request from the filtered request type shown in the Service dependencies topology.
• From the Service dependencies topology view, you can expand this instance level topology to view the full topology in context.

  The Service dependencies view in the Kubernetes Service dashboard shows what application is calling this service and what this service is calling, one step at a time. This view shows service-to-service relationships to help you debug issues across the dependency tree. For example, if the symptoms presented in the Latency and Error line charts are bad but the Traffic and Saturation did not change, you can search this view to find out what is being called. Click a service to open its dashboard. For more information about the Service dependencies topology, see Service dependencies topology view.

• View tracing data for the services.

Transaction tracking is automatically enabled for some agents and data collectors but must be manually enabled for others. See the following table for more information about the agents and data collectors that support transaction tracking.

Table 1. Transaction tracking enablement for agents and data collectors

Agent or data collector	Enabled by default	How to enable or disable
Go data collector		Customizing the Go data collector
J2SE data collector		Customizing the J2SE data collector
Liberty data collector		Customizing the Liberty data collector
Node.js data collector		Customizing the Node.js data collector
Python data collector		Customizing the Python data collector
Ruby data collector		Customizing the Ruby data collector
WebSphere® Applications agent		Configuring the data collector interactively
DEM DEM for Liberty applications DEM for HTTP server		DEM depends on traction tracking to view browser data and metrics in topology. Do not disable TT for DEM.

• To view the Service dependencies topology, do the following steps:
  1. Click the Resource dashboard in the UI console.
  2. In the Resource types list, find Kubernetes Service and click it to open.
  3. Find the resource name that has transaction tracking enabled, and drill down. You can see the Service dependencies topology.
     
  4. You can click on Expand/Collapse to open a richer topology view.
     
• To view the tracing data, do one of the following options:
  • View tracing data from the Kubernetes Service dashboard:
    1. Click the Resource dashboard in the UI console.
    2. In the Resource types list, find Kubernetes Service and click it to open.
    3. Find the resource name that has transaction tracking enabled, and drill down.
    4. Filter the request in the Golden signals to find the transaction tracing icon and drill down to check transaction tracing data and topology.
  • View tracing data from the runtime data collector resource dashboard:
    1. Go to the Resources tab, and drill down to its dashboard.
    2. Check the application golden signal data.
    3. Filter the request to find the transaction tracing icon to drill down to check transaction tracing data and topology.
       
       Note: For the runtime data collectors, the mechanism for the golden signal sampling rate and the OpenTracing sampling rate are not the same. Therefore, you might not be able to see transaction tracing data for some requests of the golden signal.
    4. You can drag to move the 5 min area.
    5. You can click the point outside the 5 min area to compare.