As we announced previously in Web Performance Monitor 2.1.0 - What's Coming in Recorder post we have just launched Web Performance Monitor 2.1.0 Beta release. This Beta has many great new features, continues to evolve WPM and integrates with other Orion-based products.

Note: This Beta is over.

What are some of the new features in this Beta?

• Integration with SAM
  • Ability to create dependencies between Transactions and Applications
  • Ability to create dependencies between Transactions and Nodes
  • New Resources to display linked Applications and Nodes for easier troubleshooting
  • New Transactions subview in Node Details page
  • New Transactions subview in Application Details page
• Custom Properties for Transactions and Recordings
• Support for web-based Reporting

... and a lot more described in Web Performance Monitor 2.1.0 - What's Coming in Recorder post.

Integration with SAM

When the transaction is down or performing poorly, you want to know where the problem is. All of that information is present in Orion, but you must know where to look. You also need to look into many places before you identify the root cause. The problems could be located in the network, on the server where your web application is running or in any of the services which your web app is using. To help you troubleshoot the issue, you can create a link (dependency) between your transaction and applications or nodes. There are two ways of doing this. Either as part of new transaction wizard or in manage dependencies page.

Create a Dependency

When you are creating a transaction, there is a new step in the wizard. On the Transaction Summary page click on the "Manage Transactions" in the "All Transactions" resource. Click on the "Add Monitor" button, which will start a wizard.

This step lets you create a new dependency on both applications and nodes. In case you selected more recordings or more locations in the previous steps of the wizard, you will create "recordings x locations" transactions (for example, 2 transactions and 3 locations will create 6 transactions). You can define dependencies individually for every transaction.

When you click on "Add nodes" or "Add applications" you have the ability to choose from all Orion nodes or applications.

You can achieve the same result by creating a dependency using standard Manage Dependencies page in Node & Group Management under Settings.

Displaying Dependencies

When you are done and your transactions are linked to nodes and applications, you will notice two new resources in Transaction Details page. First is "Transaction related Nodes" and second is "Transaction related Applications". They display a simple list of nodes and applications with their statuses. You can click on the node or application name to open Node Details or Application Details page.

Dependencies will behave as you would expect in terms of statuses. If the transaction is down and any of the nodes or any of the applications are down, transaction status will change to "Unreachable".

Dependencies are visible in the Node Details and Applications Details pages. There is a new subview for each with transactions linked to the respective node or application. This subview is using resources from the Transaction Summary page, but their content is filtered only to linked transactions. Thus you can easily identify transaction affected by any changes to the given node or application.

Currently these new resources support only dependencies created between nodes or applications and a WPM transaction..

Custom Properties

Custom properties is a great way to give additional structure to your transactions, create dynamic groups, account limitations, filter resources or group by them in various resources. You can define a new custom property within the Manage Custom Properties page located under Settings. Click on the "Add custom property" button and in the first step choose Transactions or Recordings.

In the next step you can define parameters of the custom property

and define values for one or more transactions. From this point, you can use custom properties to filter or group transactions in resources, create dynamic groups, report on their values or limit accounts.

Now you know what is coming, don't forget to leave us feedback!