Achieving 3 Clicks to Issue Resolution via ASM
A quick UI and visual intro to the ASM Portal.
This table will provide a brief overview of using Apica Synthetic Monitoring in the portal.
What you see above is the home dashboard of ASM.
These checks are organized by check function, but you can set these up in whatever way is relevant to your teams, whether by application business unit, the region that these checks are running, production or status, criticality; it's really up to you.
We can get some quick insight into all the virtual traffic from Apica to your site in the dashboard. This traffic includes your applications, externally coming from Apica's Saas network or internally from an Apica internal agent running behind your corporate firewall. All that data is going to be aggregated here in the dashboard.
Step/Discussion | Screenshot |
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So first off, I want to point out that all the events coming into the dashboard are mapped at a severity level; those will be our greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. These correspond to Information, Warning, Error, and Fatal. | |
The two reasons that we have these four levels (rather than a simple just pass-fail, or a red, yellow, green) is 1. SLA Precision. To calculate a more precise impact on our applications SLAs. So this information warning will not impact our SLA, whereas the orange one or red will. So you can set the SLA thresholds on a rolling average or standard deviation of dominant or active timings. 2. 3rd Party Impact. Flagging third-party failures as warnings but not count these against your core SLAs. So, you can ignore failures that may happen on a third-party tracking pixel within a browser scenario. So that's one of the ways that we allow you to be flexible in defining multiple severity levels for your SLAs. Fewer False Positive Alerts. Very importantly, these additional levels allow you to have more categories to handle how you create alerts. Each one of these severity levels is customizable. More in the advanced feature overview or some great resources in the Apica Knowledge Base for customizing the severity levels. Your policies are what help define as a pass or a failure. If you're familiar with other synthetics, you also know that the more you can identify potential false positives, the less alert-fatigue that your response teams will have in responding to the alerts coming from your monitoring applications. | |
Three Clicks to Resolution: In the dashboard, there are three levels of detail coming from this top-level. The 1st level is the dashboard. At this level you can see the current Up/Down status of the check as well as in segments of 6 hours that cover the last 24 hours. Tip: You can bypass the 2nd level, and directly to the 3rd level (a single check run) right from the dashboard by hovering over one of these status bars for the last 24 hours and clicking into one of the points of the trendline. | |
The 2nd level will be a detailed view of a particular check. The 2nd level isolates a single check and presents 4 sections
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The 3rd level is going to be a run result level detail. This view of a single check will contain that check’s results for the run. All checks will have their Type, Agent Location, Title, check run date and time, and a high level summary. Each check type will have a levels of detail that are particular to their function. In the example to the right, the Postman check that will be checking an API’s response will have Variables and Assertions that a web browser check or DNS check won’t have. | |
URL Run Comparison Example | |
AppDynamics Example. Click on the spike with the Yellow warning, and it will take us to the waterfall view. But just above the waterfall, note first the Result Message: “…Time (3,896) was above upper limit (3,826 ms).“ So the reason that we saw the warning is that we have an upper limit of 3.8 seconds, and we breached that in this spike. The domains called here and the 10 slowest URLs. So we can immediately identify which resources are causing those problems from the run view here. |
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There are some other views that we can get into, like the Health and Events view or an operations view, to start the drill down. But we can get into those perhaps in later videos, and I hope to catch you in the next tutorial. Thank you.
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