Business iQ - Transaction Analytics Webinar
[Air-Date February 21, 2018] Run Time: 56 minutes.
@Mohammed.Rayan led this introductory transaction analytics session. During this session, Mohammed also demonstrated the capabilities of transaction analytics and shed light on the art-of-the-possible with Business iQ. See below for the attached slide deck and additional resource links.
BIQ Community Resources:
Webinar Q&A Transcript
How do I enable Transaction Analytics for an application?
- Within the Controller, go to the Analytics tab at the top and select the Configuration tab from the left-hand navigation bar.
- In the Transaction Analytics tab, select the application of interest from the Configure Analytics For Application drop-down menu.
- Check the box to Enable Analytics Data Collection For XXXX, then select the Business Transactions that will report analytics data.
- You can add and configure Method Invocation Data Collectors to capture custom data. Specify the data you would like to retrieve and display in Transaction Analytics by extracting a particular parameter from your code. You can enable HTTP Request Data Collectors, as well.
How can I run a query and view Transaction Analytics?
- To run a query, navigate to the Analytics tab and select the Searches tab.
- Click the +Add button and select either Drag and Drop Search or Query Language Search.
In the Data view, you can customize your search criteria and filter by time frame and fields (e.g., Application or Business Transaction) to see raw data.
Within the Visualization view, you can create and save a widget to your Dashboard. One helpful widget type is the Funnel widget.
Additional properties were added as part of 4.4 to provide more control over the widget appearance.
If you click the gear icon in the top-right corner of the Controller and select AppDynamic Agents and the Analytics Agents tab, you can see the Transaction Pipeline Health and Log Pipeline Health. You can also sort by All Agents, Agents Publishing Log Data, and Agents Publishing Transaction Data, which can help you identify which agents are publishing the transaction data.
What are best practices for enabling Business Transaction collections for analytics?
As a best practice, we recommend you start by enabling just a few Business Transactions that you know well and matter most to see what the patterns and contents are and then slowly increase from there.
Avoid enabling Business Transaction collections for analytics for everything initially, as it can be challenging and can cause you to run into other types of issues (e.g., connectivity or licensing issues).
Additionally, on the Business Transaction schema that we have, you may know that we have an All Other Traffic bucket. Many times what we find is that Business Transactions are enabled but in reality, that information is going into the All Other Traffic bucket because you are limited in terms of Business Transaction numbers per node or per application. That’s why being iterative here with your Business Transaction collections makes a lot more sense and will be useful for you in learning the flow as you enable them. Start with one Business Transaction that you know really well and incrementally go from there.
How do SQL Data Collectors work? Are they strictly for transaction data stored in the database (limited to just transactions) or do they access other event types?
It pertains only to transaction collection. SQL Data collections will show you the parameter value as part of that transaction so when the analytics data set, you’ll actually see the value was passed to that particular SQL. That’s what this will allow you to do.
It doesn’t send any other event types. In SQL Data Collectors, that’s all the SQL database calls from the Business Transactions, and from the parameters of those SQL calls, we capture specific custom or business information.
