A First in APM, Only Possible with LightStep [đť‘Ą]PM
April 17, 2018 | Lindsay Tyson & Dennis Chu
LightStep [x]PM analyzes 100% of unsampled transaction data for all of our customers’ production systems. This wealth of information can be used to quickly explain root causes and resolve time-sensitive issues like errors and latency spikes.
We’re releasing a set of new features in Live View (formerly Latest Traces) that makes it even easier to discover and categorize the different latency behaviors in any application, and to pinpoint within seconds exactly what’s slow for those categories.
Live Latency Histogram
This new chart shows the global latency distribution for the full set of spans, or timed operations, that are currently in memory across every [x]PM Satellite within your environment.
Below the histogram, [x]PM shows some example spans from the same dataset to give you a better idea of the transactions currently going through the application. You can use the search box to limit the scope of the histogram and the example spans below to a specific Service, Operation, and/or custom Tags. You can also click and drag along the latency axis of the histogram chart to further narrow the set of example spans to include only those in a specific latency range. These powerful features make it possible to flexibly examine the real-time latency characteristics for an application in its entirety, through monoliths and microservices, or filter by any dimension, no matter how focused or broad.
Sub-trace Preview
[x]PM now also shows key information about the sub-trace for each example span shown in Live View. A sub-trace is the portion of an overall end-to-end trace that consists of the displayed span itself and its descendant spans. The Sub-trace Summary column now shows the total number of spans in each sub-trace. Hovering over the rows in this column will show the most time-consuming operations within that particular sub-trace. Each span’s duration is also now depicted visually as a horizontal bar that varies in length in relation to the other example spans shown, making it much easier to spot outliers and anomalies. These enhancements are designed to help users quickly find spans that are abnormally slow, spans that contain large sub-traces, and spans that may be behaving unusually in other ways.
Search Enhancements
Lastly, we made some usability improvements to the search box in Live View. There is now a guided search builder that more clearly categorizes search terms by Service, Operation, and Tags. There is no practical limit to the number of search terms that you can include. When adding a new search term, you can scan the drop-down for a list of suggestions or begin typing to quickly find what you’re looking for. Past searches are saved locally and can be viewed by clicking on the Recent Searches tab.
Learn More
Register for our upcoming webinar, LightStep [x]PM Latency Histogram, airing Wednesday, April 25th at 9:00 am PT, 12:00 pm ET, and see a live demo of these powerful new features.
We’re thrilled to introduce these core features to [x]PM, and believe these new capabilities will dramatically transform how you approach performance management today and help you discover and fix reliability issues quickly and more efficiently. We hope you’re just as excited as we are!
Originally published at lightstep.com on April 17, 2018.
