Problem Analysis Report
In today's era, business-critical web applications play a major role in many aspects. If transaction requests to a web application is slow, the user experience may suffer. If users frequently complain of application inaccessibility or its poor responsiveness to transaction requests, the enterprise can lose dearly, in terms of revenue, support cycles, productivity, penalties, and reputation! To ensure that the user experience is always maintained on par, administrators must quickly identify when exactly the problem occurred and, where was the actual problem - was it in the infrastructure? Or was it due to transaction processing delays? or was it due to a problem with the application front-end (i.e., browser)? or due a flaky network connection? and take remedial measures at the earliest. To aid administrators in this regard, eG Enterprise offers the Problem Analysis report. This report helps the administrators historically analyze the end-to-end performance of the BTM-enabled environment in a few clicks and highlight bottleneck areas.
To generate the Problem Analysis report, do the following:
Login to eG Reporter.
Follow the menu sequence: REPORTS BY FUNCTION -> Domain-specific Reports -> Web Application Monitoring -> Business Transaction Monitoring -> Problem Analysis.
Using this report, you can analyze the performance of one/more managed components, or those that are part of a zone, service or segment. The options provided by the Analyze By list box are discussed hereunder:
Component: Select this option to choose the component (s) from across all the managed components in the environment.
Zone: To generate a report for one/more components that are included in a zone, pick the Zone option. A Zone drop-down list will then appear, from which you would have to select the zone to which the components of interest to you belong to. A Sub zone flag also appears. Indicate whether the components present within the sub-zones of the chosen zone are also to be considered for report generation, by setting the Sub zone flag to Yes.
Segment: If you want to generate a report for one/more chosen components that belong to a segment, select the Segment option from Analyze By list box, and then pick the Segment from the drop-down list that appears.
Service: If you want to generate a report for one/more components involved in the delivery of a service, select the Service option from Analyze By, and then pick the required Service from the drop-down list that appears.
In the Component list box, all the components pertaining to the chosen Component Type will be listed. If the Component list consists of too many web application servers, then viewing all the components and selecting the ones you need for report generation could require endless scrolling. To avoid this, you can click the
button next to the Component list. This will open the Components pop up window using which you can view almost all the components in a single interface and Select the ones for which the report is to be generated. If there are still too many components in the list to choose from, you can narrow your search further by using the Search Components text box. Specify the whole/part of the component name to search for in this text box, and click the icon next to it. The Component list will then be populated with all component names that embed the specified search string. Select the component of your choice from this list. Provide a report Timeline. You can either select a fixed timeline such as 1 hour, 2 days, etc., or choose the Any option from the Timeline list, and then provide a From and To date/time for report generation.
Note
For every user registered with the eG Enterprise system, the administrator can indicate the maximum timeline for which that user can generate a report. Once the maximum timeline is set for a user, then, whenever that user logs into eG Reporter and attempts to generate a report, the Timeline list box in the report page will display options according to the maximum timeline setting of that user. For instance, if a user can generate a report for a maximum period of 3 days only, then 3 days will be the highest option displayed in the Timeline list - i.e., 3 days will be the last option in the fixed Timeline list. Similarly, if the user chooses the Any option from the Timeline list and proceeds to provide a start date and end date for report generation using the From and To specifications, eG Enterprise will first check if the user's Timeline specification conforms to his/her maximum timeline setting. If not, report generation will fail. For instance, for a user who is allowed to generate reports spanning over a maximum period of 3 days only, the difference between the From and To dates should never be over 3 days. If it is, then, upon clicking the Run Report button a message box will appear, prompting the user to change the From and To specification.
In addition to the settings discussed above, this report comes with a set of default specifications. These settings are hidden by default. If you do not want to disturb these default settings, then you can proceed to generate the report by clicking the Run Report button soon after you pick a Measure. However, if you want to view and then alter these settings (if required ), click on the
icon. The default settings will then appear in the More Options drop down window. The steps below discuss each of these settings and how they can be customized.If the timeline specified for the report needs to exclude the data collected during the Weekends, then set Exclude weekends to Yes. If not, select No.
Note
By default, the weekend constitutes Saturday and Sunday. To override this default setting, do the following:
Edit the eg_report.ini file in the <EG_INSTALL_DIR>\manager\config directory.
In the [EXCLUDE_WEEKEND] section of the file, the Days parameter is set to Saturday,Sunday by default. You can modify this by setting the Days parameter to a comma-separated list of other days of the week - say Friday,Saturday.
Save the file after making the required changes.
Next, specify the start time and end time for report generation against the Time period field.
Note
By default, the Time period is set to 24 hours. Accordingly, the From and To parameters in the [timeframe] section of the eg_report.ini file (in the <EG_INSTALL_DIR>\manager\config directory) are set to 00:00 and 24:00 respectively. If need be, you can override this default setting by configuring a different timeframe against the From and/or To parameters.
In large environments, reports generated using months of data can take a long time to complete. Administrators now have the option of generating reports on-line or in the background. When a report is scheduled for background generation, administrators can proceed with their other monitoring, diagnosis, and reporting tasks, while the eG manager is processing the report. This saves the administrator valuable time. To schedule background processing of a report, select the Background Save - PDF option from the Report Generation list. In this case, a Report Name text box will appear, where you would have to provide the name with which the report is to be saved in the background. To process reports in the foreground, select the Foreground Generation - HTML option from this list.
Note
The Report Generation list will appear only if the EnableBackgroundReport flag in the [BACKGROUND_PROCESS] section of the eg_report.ini file (in the {EG_INSTALL_DIR}\manager\config directory) is set to Yes.
The default selection in the Report Generation list will change according to the Timeline specified for the report. If the Timeline set is greater than or equal to the number of days specified against the MinDurationForReport parameter in the [BACKGROUND_PROCESS] section of the eg_report.ini file, then the default selection in the Report Generation list will be Background. On the other hand, if the Timeline set for the report is lesser than the value of the MinDurationForReport parameter, then the default selection in the Report Generation list will be Foreground. This is because, the MinDurationForReport setting governs when reports are to be processed in the background. By default, this parameter is set to 2 weeks - this indicates that by default, reports with a timeline of 2 weeks and above will be processed in the background.
Finally, click the Run Report button to generate the report.
If the Report Generation is Foreground Generation - HTML, then the report will appear as soon as you click the Run Report button.
The Summary section of the generated report reveals the total number of problems occurred at different layers such as infrastructure, JVM and Container, business transaction and user layers during processing the user requests.
Next, table provided in the Problem Details section contains four columns that provide administrators brief description about the problems (if any) that occurred at infrastrcture, JVM and Container, business transaction and user layers, respectively. The brief descriptions include alert messages accompanied by a colored indicator that indicates the corresponding alarm priority, time stamp at which the problem occurred and the time stamp at which the problem was resolved. In addition, problem description in which the end time is set to current denotes a problem that has still not been fixed. Analyzing the descriptions given in the columns, administrators can easily figure out how many problems have been reported and resolved in each layer over a period of time and the criticality of the problems that seriously affected the user experience.