In the Cisco Cloud Observability application model, application performance monitoring (APM) entities are used to present and organize performance information about your application environment. This page introduces APM entities and describes how to start monitoring them.

Application Performance Monitoring Entities

Cisco Cloud Observability enables you to monitor the following APM entities through a series of views and selections that provide greater detail about the entity in focus:

  • Service: A software module that performs a particular task and can comprise any number of Service Instances.
  • Service Instance: Represents an instantiation of a Service. Performs the task and consumes resources.
  • Business Transaction: A visual representation of the transactions (request and response) that take place for the services on the application. It provides an end-to-end, cross-tier processing path that is used to fulfill a request for a service provided by the application.
  • Trace: Represents a transaction that traveled through your system. A Trace is made of one or more Spans, including one for each unit or service that handled that transaction. 
  • Span: Represents a unit of operation or work. Spans are the building blocks of Traces because every span provides specific, additional details about a transaction.

Retention and Purge Time-to-Live (TTL)

The following table lists the retention TTL and purge TTL for all APM entities.

EntityRetention TTLPurge TTL

Services

1,440 minutes (1 day)

4,200 minutes
Service Instances

180 minutes (3 hours)

4,200 minutes
Business Transactions

1,440 minutes (1 day)

4,200 minutes

Get Started

  1. To monitor APM entities, you must use an OpenTelemetry™ Collector to ingest OpenTelemetry data in the form of traces and spans coming from your applications. You can use one of the following methods:

    MethodDescription
    Install Kubernetes and App Service Monitoring

    Installs the entire package required for Kubernetes and App Service Monitoring, which includes the Cisco AppDynamics Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. This method is intended for users who either have not deployed any OpenTelemetry Collectors or want to use the Splunk AppDynamics package.

    Configure Open-Source OpenTelemetry Collectors to Send OTLP Data

    Intended for users who have already deployed OpenTelemetry Collectors and want to configure them to send application trace and log data to the Cisco Cloud Observability backend.

  2. After you successfully configure an OpenTelemetry Collector, Cisco Cloud Observability begins pulling metrics and populates the Observe page with an Application Performance Monitoring domain. This domain contains links to entity-centric pages (ECPs) that can be used to monitor your applications.

For information about user interface tools, see Understand the Observe UI.

OpenTelemetry™ is a trademark of The Linux Foundation®.