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By Guillaume Savary

Application transactions in real time for performance troubleshooting

Why capturing application transactions in real time?

Network-aware NPM solutions provide visibility into TCP-level performance, providing a broad view of whether the degradation comes from the network conditions, the server processing time, or the volume of data sent back and forth still has value. It enables IT Operations to pinpoint the origin of a broad performance slowdown. However, most NPM solutions don’t support application transactions.

Transaction-level application performance monitoring

SkyLIGHT PVX is a 100% non-intrusive NPM solution that supports application transactions.

  • Agentless: no agent to install (neither on clients nor on servers)
  • No code modification or injection
  • No impact on performance (no logging overhead on the server)
  • No need for specific rights on the systems being monitored

SkyLIGHT PVX’s unique key features

Focused on application transactions!

Many vendors speak about transactions and provide the details of a transaction with a packet decoder.

When performing application performance diagnostics, it is important to manipulate data not at the packet level but at the application layer to decide which transaction you need to take a closer look at.

In the first steps of troubleshooting, you need to be able to:

  • See application transactions, not packets so that the data is understandable by all teams…
  • Sort data by many criteria: number of queries, individual response codes, error statuses, processing times, network data transfer times…
  • Filter information on response codes or even on the details of a request…

SkyLIGHT PVX enables you to do all of this on a very large range of transactions, covering hours or days of data, meaning that you are able to manipulate a huge number of transactions (i.e, in the millions or more).

Application transactions support - example of an SQL query
Application transactions support – example of an SQL query

Real-time, really real-time!

SkyLIGHT PVX records APM data at both the network and application levels, 24 x 7. This means that your performance data is available from OSI layers 2 through 7 almost instantly.

You do not need to extract a network capture and insert it into another module to view the layer 7 transactions from a network flow. A single click is enough to move from network performance data to application transaction details.

The ability to view all SQL transactions for a conversation
The ability to view all SQL transactions for a conversation

All application transactions in detail

When it comes to troubleshooting, it is critical to be able to dive deep into the details of how similar transactions performed at different points of time to understand what influenced performance (e.g., network conditions, server status).

Capturing all transactions makes sense provided that you can actually provide both an overview of the transaction performance (i.e., evolution graphs, top reports, etc…) but also the details for each transaction (i.e., client/requester, server, query details, response code, performance metrics, network conditions, etc…).

SkyLIGHT PVX offers some of the broadest real-time transaction analysis coverage on the market. Examples of application transactions decoded in real time include:

  • Web Applications (HTTP/HTTPS)
  • Databases (MS-SQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, IBM DB2, Sybase)
  • Name Resolution (DNS, mDNS, Netbios-WINS)
  • Storage and File Transfer (CIFS, SMB v1, v2, v3)
  • VoIP (RTP, SIP, SCCP-Skinny, MGCP)

All these application transaction analyses are provided by default, without any option or additional module.

Coverage of today’s datacenters: Physical and Virtual networks

Most data centers integrate virtualization systems on a massive basis in order to save costs, reduce deployment time, and gain flexibility and resilience. As a consequence, a lot of the server-to-server traffic is exchanged between virtual machines via the switches embedded in virtualization chassis.

This means that a significant part of the traffic which is strategic for performance troubleshooting does not actually reach the physical switches.

To conduct an efficient performance troubleshooting in this case, you need to have a visibility on the traffic flowing through both physical and virtual switches. Capturing data on the virtual network has a certain number of consequences:

  • You cannot extract all the traffic to analyze it (most virtualization chassis do not have dedicated NICs for that purpose)
  • You need to capture traffic inside the virtualization chassis through the virtual switches (e.g. VMware Virtual Distributed Switch – VDS).
  • You cannot require significant resources on each vSphere host that you need to capture traffic in; the capture engine must be discrete and rely on minimal resources.

SkyLIGHT PVX natively integrates all of these features:

  • Network to transaction level performance measurement
  • Real-time application transaction analysis
  • Physical and virtual traffic capture.