Hi everyone! Here are a few questions from the session (get the full Q&A deck in the #office-hours Slack channel):

Q1: How do you teach an application/support team how to troubleshoot an APM alert?

Set yourself up for success! Include attributes such as environment, service.name, the actual value setting off the alert, and if possible a link to your runbook in an alert!

Using the above attributes and data can turn responding to alerts from an investigative chore into a checklist.

Q2: Are APM and ITSI together observability or is it a different concept and only available on cloud?

Complementary Visibility: Together they provide "Observability" linking app telemetry (APM) to high-level business services (ITSI).

Complementary Roles: APM identifies specific code-level bugs. ITSI monitors the overall health and "big picture" of your IT/Business operations.

Cloud & Hybrid: APM is a "cloud-native" SaaS service, whereas ITSI is flexible and can run both in the cloud and on-premises.

Q3: Is tracing only on APM or can I have traces on anything?

You can have traces on more or less anything! APM is the "tracing" tool in Splunk Observability so it is where you view your traces and spans. Context can be shared between traces and logs using trace/span ID correlation.

Q4: What are some best practices for configuring health rules and alerts in Splunk APM?

Focus on "Golden Signals" such as RED or LETS metrics. Scope to apps, environments, teams, or other logical groupings. Leverage templating and configuration as code! Gives you a source of truth for what is important vs what has just been created in the UI. Version control!

Q5: How does Splunk APM connect user experience with backend application performance?

Unified Trace IDs: Unique ID to a user's browser interactions (via Real User Monitoring) and follows that same ID through every backend database and server call to see the full journey.

Impact Mapping: It uses a visual "Service Map" to show exactly how a slow backend microservice or a database error is directly causing a "spinning wheel" or failure for the end user.

Full-Fidelity Troubleshooting: Because it captures 100% of transactions, engineers can search for a specific user's session and see the exact line of backend code that caused their experience to be slow.

Other Questions (check the #office-hours Slack channel for responses)

• Is there a way to have a saved service map for a specific application?
• Is Splunk Observability Cloud the same with Discover Splunk Observability Cloud, and if it is not, how to get it into the Splunk Cloud Platform Instance or implement it to the Splunk Cloud?
• Do you have a sample of what a APM Database Monitoring looks like, it's not enabled for my account. What's the difference between infrastructure DB monitoring?
• Does the DB Monitoring bridge the gap between Observability Cloud and AppDynamics monitoring? i.e. go into the detail AppDynamics does by default?
• What’s the overhead on the SQL server to enable this?