Over the past several weeks we’ve improved the Dynatrace infographic-based application views with additional features and use cases that we know you’ll appreciate.
Most of the application-view enhancements were detailed in an earlier blog post, but here’s a short recap:
Application overview page
To access the new application overview page:
Click the Applications tile on your homepage.
Select an application.
On the new Application overview page you’ll see four sections on the left side of the page:
Performance details: (highlighted in red below).
User behavior analytics: (coming soon) The grayed out portion of the infographic on the right side is still under development, but will be released soon. In a related post, you can read about our plans for user behavior analytics.
Included domains: Here you’ll find a list of the “top domains” that your application uses. Creating new applications from domains and adding domains to other applications is now easier with the new UI design.
Problems and Events: Unchanged from earlier design.
Click the Performance details portion of the infographic to see the new application Performance analysis page and infographic (see image and detailed explanation below).
Application performance analysis
The new application Performance analysis page displays a number of key performance metrics for your application (the original set of metrics in addition to some new metrics). Each area of the infographic is clickable, offering access to deeper detail regarding each metric. Here you’ll also find the Top 5 consumers list (the five user actions that consume the most time in the application) and a Show all consumers button, which gives you access to the complete list of top consumers for the application.
Here’s a quick overview of the new features:
Time frame selector: You can select time ranges to analyze. Aggregate (median) values are displayed in the infographic change for the selected time frame.
Dimensions: You can analyze three different dimensions of real user experience: Browsers, User types (new!), and Locations. Click one of these dimensions to view detailed analysis of the selected dimension. Note that the time frame selector affects the values shown for these dimensions. By selecting User types you can compare usage and action duration of Real users versus synthetic Robots and Web checks.
User action duration and User actions /min (i.e., traffic): Median values for the selected time frame are displayed. Click this portion of the infographic to display charts that offer much greater detail. You’ll find charts for Impact of user activity on action duration over time, Action duration contributors over time, and Action duration distribution over time.
User actions are divided into Load actions and XHR actions (or custom actions if available) because load actions offer different metrics, for example Document interactive time. Select the Load and XHR tabs to view these metrics.
You can also use the metric selector to display either the Slowest 10%, Median, or Fastest 10% of user actions.
You can use the Compare with previous timeframe button to analyze any two time frames simultaneously. This compare feature is available for most charts.
Apdex and JavaScript errors: The application infographic includes two clickable areas for Apdex rating and the JavaScript errors. The use cases for these metrics have not changed, but you can now select longer time frames for the charts and compare trends over time by clicking the Compare with previous timeframe button.
Resources: Click the Resources portion of the performance analysis infographic to access details regarding the resources that your application relies on. Detected resources are divided into 3rd party resources, CDN resources, and 1st party resources. Click the tabs above charts or click directly into the pie chart to explore these metrics in great detail. 3rd party resources and CDN resources can be sorted based on both user Action count (default) or Busy time, enabling you to quickly identify the slowest providers.
Click the 1st party resources tab to look for trends in your internal resources–Scripts, Images, and CSS resources are tracked and reported separately.
To understand how Dynatrace real user monitoring evaluates the content sources of all browser-loaded content to determine if it is 3rd party content, 1st party content, or a CDN-delivered content, see Segmented results for 1st party resources, CDNs, and 3rd party providers.
Web checks: Web checks, which automatically monitor the availability and performance of your application, are also included in the Performance analysis infographic. Click the Web checks portion of the infographic to access the web checks that are run against the selected application.
Services: Click the Services portion of the infographic to view the services that are involved with the selected application.
User actions
The new Performance analysis infographic isn’t only useful for analyzing your application. It’s also useful for analyzing user actions, regardless of if the actions are high priority user actions with long-term historical data or regular user actions, for which charts can only show short time frames.
The Top 5 consumers list shows you the slowest user actions. User actions for which Dynatrace detects anomalies are always listed first and marked with a red icon. Actions are next sorted based on priority (high priority actions listed first) and Time consumption (action duration * actions per minute). Click the Show all consumers button to view the complete list of user actions and access additional sorting options (for example, action Duration and number of JavaScript errors).
Click any individual user action to change the focus of the Performance analysis infographic to the user action itself. Full historical data is available for high-priority user actions (see theHomepage user action example below). Normal priority user actions offer historical data for the past 24 hours (see the Search user action example below). For this reason is makes sense to increase the priority of important user actions like shopping carts, landing pages, and login actions by clicking the Increase priority of this user action link in the toolbar.
As when analyzing the application itself, you can click different metrics in the Performance analysis infographic to view detailed metrics for the selected user action. Also, the Top web request contributors list is still available here to show you how the user actions relate to detected server-side services.
One additional feature–only available for the high-priority user actions–is the ability to create a dedicated tile on your homepage that tracks the performance of a single user action. Just click Pin to home.
Other use cases and views
Show top findings analyzes the application on various dimensions for interesting findings.
JavaScript details: by selecting one of the JavaScript errors from the list, the JavaScript details view opens, providing stack traces and occurrence details, like on which browsers and for which user actions.
World map can be accessed via the world map tile.
Timeline
For details about the Analyze on timeline button, see the previous blog post Timeline analysis for user actions. This view is still in beta, so we’d love to hear your feedback about it.
