AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform
3.8.x Documentation
Configuring background tasks consists of two basic steps:
1. Enabling automatic discovery so that AppDynamics will detect the background process and monitor it.
2. Configuring thresholds for what you consider to be slow, very slow, or stalled performance behavior.
Sometimes AppDynamics will discover a background task and interpret it to be a business transaction. You can instruct AppDynamics to Configuring a Business Transaction as a Background Task.
Automatic discovery of background tasks is disabled by default. When you know that there are background tasks in your application environment and you want to monitor them, first enable automatic discovery so that AppDynamics will detect the task.
AppDynamics provides preconfigured support for some common frameworks. If your application is not using one of the default frameworks you can create a custom match rule.
1. In the left navigation pane, click Configure -> Instrumentation.
2. On the Transaction Detection tab, select the tier for which you want to enable monitoring.
3. Click Use Custom Configuration for this Tier.
4. Scroll down to the Custom Match Rules pane.
5. Do one of the following
The Background Task check box should be already checked.
6. Check Enabled.
7. Click Save.
The custom match rule for the background task will take effect and the background task will display in the Business Transaction List.
Once you enable discovery, every background task is identified based on following attributes:
For additional details see:
The out-of-the-box stall thresholds for background tasks are disabled. This is because the default configuration for stall detection is 45 seconds, which is usually not enough time to detect stalled background tasks.
AppDynamics recommends that you configure a threshold that is suitable for the background task in your environment.
AppDynamics also recommends that you use static thresholds for slow and very slow background tasks, if they have infrequent load patterns such as once every night. This is because the dynamic moving average-based thresholds are more suitable for production load scenarios and will automatically classify a background process as slow or very slow.
1. In the left navigation pane click Configure -> Slow Transaction Thresholds.
2. Click the Background Tasks Thresholds tab.
3. Set the thresholds for all background tasks.
4. If you want these thresholds applied to existing background tasks, check Apply to all Existing Background Task Business Transactions.
5. Click Save Default Background Task Thresholds.
All new background tasks will use the thresholds that are configured here.
You can override default thresholds for an individual background tasks by configuring individual task thresholds.
1. In the Business Transactions List, right-click on the background task and select Configure Thresholds. AppDynamics displays the threshold settings for that background task.
2. Update the thresholds.
3. Save the changes.
You can re-configure an auto-discovered business transaction as a background task.
1. In the left navigation pane click Business Transactions.
2. In the Business Transactions List select the business transaction that you want to mark as a background task.
3. Right-click on the selected business transaction and select Set as Background Task.
4. Verify that Set as Background Task is selected in the dialog.
5. Click OK.
If you discover that a background task is better represented as a regular business transaction, repeat steps 1 and 2 then right-click and select Set as User Transaction.