Tame Complexity With PurePath™

Deepest visibility and fastest path to root-cause – without configuration hassle

At the atomic level of the dynaTrace system is the PurePath. PurePath, which enables the continuous, 24x7 tracing of 100% of your transactions, across widely distributed and complex environments. When there's a problem, how often do you pull logs, grab profilers, gather system metrics and try to make sense of it all? What if you could have a single integrated view across your entire application continuously, from business transaction to code-level, that supported all stakeholders equally with one lingua franca.

PurePath Up Close

PurePath provides the true transaction trace from entry point into your application to database and back. This entry point can be at browser click, at Web tier, or at the application tier depending on where you begin smart agent and sensor placement.

PurePath is a combination of timings gathered at each sensor plus deep code-level context gathered at each timing point. The PurePath can be augmented with additional guest and host operating system details and host system level metrics to make application and system metric correlation automatic. Through PurePath technology, you can now see all application performance, scalability and stability characteristics through the lens of the application, down through multiple layers of your infrastructure.

PurePaths are gathered the moment smart agents are injected into your application and load is applied. There is no further configuration or mapping needed, no code hooks to apply. PurePaths are automatically generated, with 100% of all transactions traced and captured, production safe for continuous 24x7 use.

PurePaths are reassembled together by the dynaTrace server in realtime. The dynaTrace server can be configured to support various transaction time intervals, from milliseconds to hours, depending on application requirements.

PurePaths are extremely valuable in supporting a variety of challenging use-cases – deep diagnostics, proactive performance management, advanced monitoring, business transaction management and user-experience management.

dynaTrace has embedded its PurePath Technology™ into a browser edition we call AJAX Edition. Via this FREE download, you can sample dynaTrace’s patented PurePath technology in context of your JavaScript/Ajax browser code. In 3 minutes, you can compare your browser application with the best of the Web, get an instant view into your hotspots and bottlenecks, and a deep drilldown into both your code and how the framework you are using behaves under load. Very simple, very cool – join > 20000 others in our Ajax community today.

PurePath Analytics

Leveraging the PurePath transaction detail, dynaTrace provides a series of powerful views and analytics built-in. These views and analytics take the large quantity of PurePath data entering the dynaTrace server and make them digestible, actionable and insightful for each stakeholder group – development, testers, architects, performance specialists, operations and business owners.

For business owners, we automatically analyze every PurePath to check them against SLAs, separate synthetics from real users, and split them by key business transactions. This allows instant dashboard and reporting of the key application parameters business users are looking for to make timely, informed decisions.

For operations, PurePath analytics are applied to disaggregate application details from system details for familiar dashboard monitoring views and faster, more accurate triage. Analytics review every PurePath against preset thresholds and problem patterns to alert operators of hotspots and breaches. And additional analytics are applied to aggregate PurePath details into a logical application topology view that can be filtered and viewed by each business transaction. This view is automatically created, fully interactive and provides end-to-end transaction flow insight (see Advance Monitoring/Transaction Flow Map).

For architects, PurePath analytics aggregate PurePath detail to provide an interactive UML diagram displaying all tiers, services, and interaction, perfect for runtime validation of your distributed architecture. Analytics are also applied across numerous parameters to highlight performance hotspots, bottlenecks and much more (see Diagnostics). And for quick determination of what has changed from version to version, or what is different between this transaction and that transaction, dynaTrace has built in a Compare capability that quickly analyses the associated PurePaths and determines what is better (green), what is worse (red) and what is new (grey).

For testers, analytics are applied to connect PurePaths to loadtest trouble-spots. Now pass on to development PurePath Sessions, complete with integrated logs, alongside your load test report. For every slow performing page/component in the report, development can now drill into PurePath detail – no more test reruns, no more ping-pong (see Test Center Edition).

For development and performance teams, PurePath analytics automatically calculate hotspots – longest running transactions, high number of database calls per request, memory leaks, duplicate threads, chattiness among tiers and services and much more. Hotspots are automatically detected to the method-level and show the full root-cause information (call stack). These many diagnostic algorithms have been developed through years of field engagements with direct customer feedback. With very little learning, and no knowledge required of the detailed architecture of an application, problem isolation and diagnostics have never been easier.

PurePath in Action

PurePaths reduce complexity, save time, and provide business value in minutes across 5 key solution areas.

For those looking for next generation user experience management , PurePaths can be collected from browser click and collected by user, tenant, geography, transaction type and so on. Whether the objective is advanced SLA management, or helpdesk troubleshooting, PurePath gives you the most accurate and complete end-to-end picture of performance to assure your most important users are, and remain, happy.

PurePaths allow dynaTrace to do business transaction management more flexibly and more accurately than any other BTM system on the market. PurePaths can be grouped into business transactions via many different parameters – transaction type, value (e.g. revenue, number, time), tenant (e.g. customer, store), geography, even user. Because PurePath sees the entire transaction call chain business transaction mapping can be much more granular and accurate than with other BTM systems that use heuristics or network sniffing to guesstimate results.

Because PurePaths go beyond timing variables only, they provide the foundation for advanced monitoring that makes SLA management against averages and manual correlation of disparate data sources both things of the past. Now SLAs can be managed against 100% accurate data, not averages. Know every transaction that breaches a threshold, not just when the average does. And with PurePath’s all-in-one correlation of timing, code-level context, guest and host OS and system metrics, triage is faster and more accurate than ever before.

PurePath is also at the foundation of dynaTrace’s unique proactive performance management capabilities. Capturing all transactions of every build or load test, with PurePath detail, developers, architects, testers and performance specialists can now use performance trending and code-level comparisons to build better code much faster. Consistent, predictable improvement enabled through PurePath.

For deep diagnostics to get to root-cause fast no matter how complex your application or distributed your environment, PurePath stands alone. No more averages, no more guesswork, no more correlations between systems, no more wasted time trying to reproduce issues. PurePath runs always-on, 100% of all transaction, with correlated application and system details, memory included. Customers claim PurePath saves them 90% or more of the time it used to take them to diagnose and isolate issues. When you figure 30-40% of development time is wasted doing just this, the PurePath impact can be significant immediately.