Add / Delete transactions

This page is obtained by clicking the ADD / DELETE TRANSACTION button in the LIST OF SITES AND TRANSACTIONS page and enables the administrator to add a new web transaction or delete an existing one. Clicking on the DELETE button beside the transaction to be removed, will delete it. To add a new transaction, the administrator has to specify the name of the transaction in the TRANSACTION NAME text box in the next section at the bottom of the page. Only a maximum of 20 characters are allowed for the name of the transaction. A maximum of 15 transactions can be added for a single web site. Corresponding to every transaction, the administrator has to specify one or more regular expression patterns. Each pattern refers to a set of pages that constitute the transaction. This has to be specified in the PAGES TO BE INCLUDED text box. The administrator is allowed to specify a maximum of 6 pages only. Every such page specification should not exceed 64 characters.

There are two criteria that an administrator can use to define transactions that must be monitored:

• Administrators can configure transactions to reflect the key operations performed by users of the web site. For example, the key transactions of a retail web site include: login, registration, browsing of the product catalog, searching the catalog, adding to shopping cart, deleting items from the cart, payment, etc. By monitoring individual transactions, web site operators can determine patterns of user accesses to individual transactions. Moreover, errors and response time issues with individual transactions can be monitored.

  As indicated above, the administrator has to provide regular expression patterns for each transaction. For example, consider a web site for which login is handled by a Java Server Page called Login.jsp and addition and deletion of products is handled by a shopping cart servlet named ShopServlet. The regular expression patterns corresponding to these transactions could be: 

Login: *Login.jsp

AddToCart: */servlets/ShopServlet?add&*

DeleteFromCart: */servlets/ShopServlet?del&*

Note:

While mentioning the Pages to be included, ensure that the the page names are  prefixed by an * (asterisk) or a slash (/). If not, no measurements will be gathered from such pages.

• Transactions can also be configured so as to differentiate between requests to the front-end web server and requests to the backend. For example, considering a web site that uses the iPlanet application server, all requests to the back-end application server can be represented by the pattern */cgi-bin/gx.cgi*. Using this approach, a web site operator can track requests sent to the back-end independent of requests targeted at the front-end web server and detect problems associated with the back-end easily.

Here, * represents zero or more characters. The administrator can also associate an image with the new transaction. One of the images can be selected by enabling the radio button beside it. Finally, clicking on the ADD button will add the new transaction.