Organize Business Transactions

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This topic describes how to manage and refine your business transaction list. In addition to modifying them directly as described here, you can change how they are named and organized at transaction detection time.

Viewing Business Transactions

To view the business transactions for an application, click Business Transactions in the application navigation tree.

Only business transactions that have performance data in the selected time range appear in the list. You can show inactive business transactions for the time range in the filter view options. Other view options include showing transactions that belong to business transaction groups or transactions that exceed a configurable average response time, among others.

The list shows key metrics for the business transactions for the selected time range. You can customize which metrics appear from the View Options menu. Additional actions you can perform to organize business transactions are in the More Actions menu. These include view health rule violations, configure thresholds, rename business transactions, group business transactions, start a diagnostic session for the transaction, classify a business transaction as a background task.

Rename Business Transactions

AppDynamics names the business transactions it discovers based on the default naming scheme for the application type of the entry point for the transaction.

You can change the name for the business transaction by selecting the business transaction and choosing Rename from the More Actions menu. This change only affects the label for the business transaction in the user interface. You can also modify the default naming scheme for subsequently discovered business transactions, as described in the discussion on naming in Business Transaction Detection.

Group Business Transactions

A transaction group lets you collect multiple related transactions into a single unit. After grouping transactions, you can see metrics aggregated for the group. Note that metrics for the individual transactions are still available as well.

A group provides a hierarchy of business transactions that need to be individually tracked but are related. For example, you may wish to group business transactions all of which have entry points in a specific WAR file. Groups could also be used to collect transactions of a specific entity, such as an organization, region, or category.

Grouping in the UI makes your lists and flowcharts easier to read by reducing visual clutter. For example, you may have a web service that has 20 methods and AppDynamics identifies them as 20 business transactions. You can group them together in the flow map, and still have access to the metrics for individual transactions in the Business Transactions List.

Grouping transactions does not affect the overall count of registered business transactions. To manage your transaction count, see Configure Custom Match Rules.

To create a business transaction group:

Select the transactions you want to group from the Business Transactions list. Use the control or shift keys to multi-select business transactions.
Right-click on the selected transactions and choose Create Group from the right-click menu.
Give the group a name and click Create Group.

Exclude or Delete Business Transactions

After you have modified the business transaction discovery configuration using custom match rules, you need to delete unwanted business transactions.

If you delete a transaction and have not changed the detection configuration, it will be rediscovered. However, if you revise the detection configuration itself properly for what you want to see and then delete the unwanted business transaction, it is not rediscovered.

Delete a business transaction by selecting the business transaction and choosing Delete from the More Actions menu.

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Lock Down Business Transactions

After arriving at a list of business transactions you want to monitor, you can prevent further changes from occurring to the list as a result of automatic detection by locking down business transactions. The Business Transaction Lockdown feature ensures that application changes, upgrades to the agent software, or other environment changes do not affect the number or selection of business transactions you monitor as the primary, first class business transactions in the AppDynamics model of your environment.

With business transaction lock down enabled, the Controller puts newly discovered transactions into the "All Other Traffic" transaction collection for the tier. You can promote a business transaction from the "All Other Transactions" list by registering it as a first class business transaction manually.

Business transaction lockdown gives you a way to register business transactions individually, by manual selection. In certain scenarios, it may make sense to enable business transaction lockdown before discovery occurs and registering transactions manually. For example, this may be useful if your environment would otherwise generate a large number of business transactions and you only want to monitor a relative few as first class business transactions.

To enable business transaction lock down, select the Enable Business Transaction Lock down option in the application instrumentation settings page.

After locking down business transactions, you can promote a transaction manually by accessing the Traffic Details dialog from the All Other Transactions dashboard. In the dialog, select the transaction and click Register to promote the transaction. If the agent is at the business transaction registration limit, you will need to delete a registered business transaction before registering one from the "All Other Traffic" list.