What are AppDynamics application troubleshooting tools, by issue? AppDynamics provides various tools for troubleshooting different application issues. Our official documentation includes several pages dedicated to troubleshooting different application components.  In this article Find recommended tools to apply in specific use cases, including: Slow Application Sudden increase in exceptions Networking bottleneck Analyzing the JVM Health Rule violation analysis  Performance impacting business  Degraded Kubernetes cluster health Mobile app crash Performance pattern UX design challenges Identifying expensive dB queries In addition, check out these consolidated references: INDEX | Troubleshooting resources by scenario Additional resources for troubleshooting  Slow application USE CASE Imagine what you might do in a situation where your service desk calls, telling you that there are complaints about slow logging into your application. What do you do? Slow Response Times  (AppDynamics Documentation) .NET Slow Response Times (AppDynamics Documentation) And by the way, have you checked Analytics to see how the issue impacted your business?  What is Business iQ? (AppDynamics University) Business iQ (AppDynamics Resources) BiQ Use Cases - take full advantage of BiQ and understand your business performance, too (AppDynamics Resources) BACK TO CONTENTS Sudden increase of exceptions USE CASE An alert reported a higher than usual error rate for certain Business Transactions, and we simultaneously spotted a sudden increase of exceptions in the application dashboard. How do we analyse it? Troubleshoot Error Transactions (AppDynamics University) Errors and Exceptions (AppDynamics Documentation) BACK TO CONTENTS Networking bottleneck  USE CASE While analyzing a Business Transaction, you discovered a lot of issues between Tiers and towards the shared backend. None of the application information, or system, points to a specific root cause but you can see the response time is unexplainably high. Before escalating to the network team, how can you further troubleshoot the Network Visibility yourself? Diagnosing Network problems (AppDynamics University) Network Issues (AppDynamics Documentation) BACK TO CONTENTS Analyzing the JVM USE CASE You notice bottlenecks on all calls processed by a Tier (specifically a JVM cluster). While analyzing you discover that the Java Virtual Machines are under high load, but you can't pinpoint it to a specific piece of code causing the high resource load, and your team of developers needs more detail about the problems you discovered in AppDynamics.  This kind of bottleneck often occurs due to underlying hardware, the JVM I/O Resources, and the JVM memory management which you now start to analyze in more detail.   Java Resource Issues  (AppDynamics Documentation) Java Memory Leaks  (AppDynamics Documentation) Java Memory Thrash  (AppDynamics Documentation) BACK TO CONTENTS Digging into problematic asynchronous calls USE CASE What if the application you monitor takes advantage of multithreading solutions? These documents will help you discover potential problems in the AppD Controller. See the AppDynamics Documentation for:  Code Deadlocks for Java (AppDynamics Documentation) Thread Concatenation (AppDynamics Documentation) Event Loop Blocking in Node.js (AppDynamics Documentation) BACK TO CONTENTS Health Rule violation analysis USE CASE Let’s say you get a new email from the AppDynamics Controller, showing a Health Rule violation. You ask yourself essential questions like:  When was the Health Rule violated?  Is the violation still ongoing? or not?  What condition(s) deviated from the normal performance, and for which entities?  Troubleshooting Health Rule violation (AppDynamics Documentation) Do you know the “Health Rule violation life cycle”? BACK TO CONTENTS Performance impacting business USE CASE Based on your research, you know that your organization’s profits are highly correlated to user experience, and consequently to the performance of crucial business transactions. So, you look for a dedicated tool for such a purpose. BiQ Metrics & Alerts and Experience Level Management (AppDynamics University) Troubleshoot Business (AppDynamics Documentation) BACK TO CONTENTS Degraded cluster health USE CASE Your organization is facing the challenge of monitoring Kubernetes environments at scale. You would like to maintain visibility into the performance and health of the Kubernetes cluster, its underlying infrastructure, and running applications. You don’t want to put too much effort into deploying and maintaining the Agents. What can AppDynamics offer in this scenario? Cluster Agent (AppDynamics Resources) Monitoring of the Cluster health (AppDynamics Documentation) BACK TO CONTENTS Mobile app crash USE CASE Your mobile application’s end users start complaining in their Google Play and App Store reviews, and the app’s ratings fall. From their comments, you conclude that the application continuously crashes. You need an immediate root cause analysis. Your application team wants to start in AppDynamics. Where to look? Troubleshoot Mobile (AppDynamics Documentation) Crash Analyze (AppDynamics Documentation) This time, you were able to solve the issue once you had a look at it. But how could you prevent running into similar issues in the future, without needing to rely on customer feedback? Proactive monitoring (AppDynamics Blog) BACK TO CONTENTS Performance pattern USE CASE Unquestionably, not every IT system is equally active 24/7, and the same is true for your application. At night, load decreases significantly. But Saturday afternoons, the application typically experiences a noticeable increase in active users.  Will AppDynamics adjust to changing characteristics of the application metrics?  Discover normal activity (AppDynamics Documentation) What if a maintenance window or other planned abnormality is approaching, and you would like to suppress alerting for a set time? Action Suppression (AppDynamics Documentation) Or (even better) how can we show that an abnormal behavior event (like Black Friday) is behaving normally despite the expected higher load? — e.g., "when does our system break, versus when the system is just under load or stress?" AIOps - Anomaly Detection, Automated Transaction Diagnostics  (AppDynamics Documentation) BACK TO CONTENTS UX design challenges USE CASE In a competitive environment, every detail matters. Your UX design team puts a lot of effort into distinguishing your application from the competition: with outstanding UX for both browser and web applications.  How can the design team understand your end users more fully? Do both front-ends perform well? Can AppDynamics be close enough to the end user to help in defining the persona?   Mobile Screenshots (AppDynamics Documentation) ExJM (AppDynamics webpage) Experience Journey Map (OneMob Video) Back to Contents Identifying expensive dB queries USE CASE It's an old truth that the database is “always the bottleneck”. Some transaction snapshots were categorized as slow and very slow. You see no pattern in neither Business Transaction, nor nodes. Might some transactions share the same, expensive dB queries?  Troubleshoot DB queries (AppDynamics Resources) BACK TO CONTENTS Index | Troubleshooting resources by scenario SCENARIO TYPE      RESOURCE LINKS Slow application Tools Slow Response Time .NET Slow Response Times Training Troubleshoot Slow Transactions Troubleshooting Using Transaction Snapshots Video Troubleshooting With AppDynamics Automated Transaction Diagnostics Mobile App is crashing Tools Troubleshoot Mobile Crash Analyze Training Mobile Crashes and Code Issues Sudden increase of exceptions Tools Errors and Exceptions Analyze Training Troubleshoot Error Transactions Video Troubleshooting With AppDynamics Networking bottleneck Tools Network Issue Use Cases Training Diagnose Network Issues Analyzing the JVM Tools Java Resource Issues Java Memory Leaks Java Memory Thrash JVM Crash Guard Training Automatic Leak Detection Object Instance Tracking Health Rule violation analysis Tools Troubleshoot Health Rule Violations Training Proactive Monitoring and Dashboards Workshop Video Troubleshooting With AppDynamics Alert Sensitivity Tuning Performance impacting business Tools Troubleshoot Business  Training Experience Level Management Video Information Points Cluster Health is degraded Tools Monitoring of the Cluster Health Articles Introducing Cluster Agent Video K8 Cluster Agent  Performance pattern Tools Discover Normal Activity Automated Transaction Diagnostics Video Metric Browser Automated Transaction Diagnostic Identifying expensive dB queries Articles Troubleshoot DB queries Training Too Many/Slow Database Calls BACK TO CONTENTS Additional Resources The troubleshooter's mind: an introduction (Community, Knowledge Base)  A guide to AppDynamics help resources (Community, Knowledge Base)  BACK TO CONTENTS ... 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Why do we troubleshoot? Troubleshooting an application means troubleshooting the business  Applications are central to our businesses — or they are the actual business. We rely heavily on them to perform user-requested actions and downstream business processing. Any application-oriented performance problems inevitably become business problems.  AppDynamics gives a holistic view of an application’s performance and gives you the tools to narrow problems down to a specific scope that’s experiencing service degradation. To narrow your problem to the root successfully, follow AppDynamics best practices:  Drill down in TIME to be aware of the exact time of the issue Drill down in SCOPE to have an understanding of the actual scope of the issue Due to the unique fit of each application to your business needs, only you can determine a problem’s context. Proactively and continuously adjust your AppDynamics application configuration to the needs of your business.  These rules will result in more streamlined and successful troubleshooting sessions, so you can resolve issues before they impact your business severely.  No matter how technical you are, you are troubleshooting your business. In this article Using the See, Act, Know Troubleshooting procedure Troubleshooting principles Troubleshooting tools Automated troubleshooting with AI Ops Additional Resources  Using the See, Act, Know troubleshooting procedure Because any troubleshooting process may be complicated, it’s essential to use a streamlined approach. The troubleshooting procedure outlined here follows AppDynamics best practices and consists of three parts:  See Act Know This successful troubleshooting strategy builds on your “configured-to-measure” Application Performance Monitoring foundation, as well as a broad understanding of the application’s environment.  SEE the root cause Triaging and troubleshooting application problems, so you can find and describe the right problems within the right scope and timeframe.  Since Dashboards present the status of the application environment visually, and in real time, they are the starting point of the troubleshooting process. An arising issue’s yellow or red color is the trigger for the analysis.  When a problem is revealed, many tools in the AppDynamics platform enable you to determine its root cause.  NOTE | See the detailed process for successful troubleshooting below, under the Seeing the problem: Troubleshooting Principles section. ACT resolve early The target for application performance is to eliminate problems before they can impact customers.  So, the Alerting Model will inform teams early about any abnormal behavior, at any layer of the application. As a result, relevant teams will be able to undertake remedial actions immediately. In the best cases, AppDynamics will trigger fully automated actions that prevent the application from running into critical issues.  You can apply these principles in a testing environment, to prevent problems before they’re promoted to production.  KNOW the impact The last step of the troubleshooting session should result in a determination of the event’s impact to the organization.  The time between the performance bottleneck’s emergence and its solution is simultaneously the time during which business was disturbed. An affected application cannot offer services to the end user and, so it adds to the business opportunities losses. In the long view, poor user experience leads to loss of customers and loss of revenue.  The AppDynamics platform’s capability to determine impact is called Business iQ, and is provided through the set of AppDynamics products that correlate your application performance with business metrics (revenue, active users, product type, payment ID, etc.) in any given timeframe. BACK TO CONTENTS Seeing the problem: troubleshooting principles There are two main principles of troubleshooting:  Drill down in time and scope Follow the red Drill down in time and scope Well-defined Health Rules reveal where an issue appears, giving you a picture of the current application status. When the Health Rule is violated, AppDynamics will inform you by either sending a notification or by illustrating the problem in a Dashboard. This presents you with one of many starting points, where others may include: an end-user complaint, or a ticket from another team.  Once your application experiences problems, what should you do? A notification or Dashboard visualization as discussed above gives you the issue’s rough scope and starting time.  The next step is to triage the exact time that the problem arose in the application and then to identify the specific component that had been affected at the very beginning of the issue, presenting you with the root cause. You accomplish this by iteratively following all impacted components and metrics in a given timeframe, which will ultimately lead to the scope and time of the problem.     Time In troubleshooting timeframe, the best practice is to locate the beginning of an issue. This issue type’s beginning is usually visible through a change of behavior in the different metrics. Since a problem becomes more unclear the longer it exists, it’s important to start at the beginning. Starting there also gives you the ability to compare what’s happening now with what was normal  in the past by: using baselines shifting the time to a day or week before the problem happened Scope Scope is a representative component, function, metric, group of components, configuration, etc. Because problems often don't show up in a single scope, it’s important to understand all involved and/or impacted scopes that might be related to the problem, as well as triaging the scope that’s affecting all other scopes. In looking at a health rule, we can actually see the time scope and issue that is presented in a health rule event. If this event is an issue’s root cause, you’ll only be able to find out by triaging the problem as described above. Follow the red  Iteratively triage the Average Response Time of transactions, Events, Errors and resource issues, taking notes at every stage of the troubleshooting session. By analyzing components with poor performance, and the performance indicators (in a given timeframe), you’ll be able to understand the affected scope, as well as gathering relevant information for further remedial actions.      When you see that an EUM Page experiences poor performance, keep in mind that the root of the problem can be caused by any component of your application environment.  Start troubleshooting in the End User Monitoring section, analyze all available metrics and try to link Browser Snapshots with the correlated Transaction Snapshot. Drill down to the back-end and analyze metrics, not only for the application itself, but also for network, infrastructure, and other entities in a given timeframe.  This should give you an understanding of the issue: scope of affected components and time of the problem.  Understanding the context At some point, you may need more data (for example expanding the visibility by adding more agents) or to collaborate with other teams (such as Infrastructure, Development, Business, etc.) who know the subject matter in detail, and who will understand why some of the metrics you discovered in AppDynamics had poor performance. A troubleshooter's skill is not only in troubleshooting and understanding the details of  a given scenario, but in also knowing their limitations and being able to escalate problems outside of their expertise.  Consequently, you must understand the application environment. AppDynamics will make detailed measurements, and show baselined performance status, but will not explain the full context of the problem. The context may be technical, such as understanding of your database characteristics. But, it can also be non-technical. For instance, only you can determine which Business Transaction is business-critical for your organization. Therefore a deeper understanding of the application environment and the application “context” is essential. BACK TO CONTENTS AppDynamics troubleshooting tools, by issue AppDynamics provides various tools for troubleshooting different application issues. Official documentation includes several pages dedicated to troubleshooting different application components.  SCENARIO Imagine what you might do in a situation where... RESOURCES Your service desk calls, telling you that there are complaints about slow logging into your application.  What do you do? Slow Response Times  .NET Slow Response Times And by the way, have you checked Analytics to see how the issue impacted your business?  An alert reported a higher than usual error rate for certain Business Transactions, and we simultaneously spotted a sudden increase of exceptions in the application dashboard.  How do we analyze it? Errors and Exceptions   While analyzing a Business Transaction, you discovered a lot of issues between Tiers and towards the shared backend. None of the application information or system points to a specific root cause but you can see the response time is inexplicably high.  Instead of escalating to the network team, can you look to the Network Visibility yourself to further troubleshoot? Network Issues You notice some bottlenecks on the side of Java Virtual Machines, and your team of developers asks for more detail about the problems you discovered in AppDynamics Java Resource Issues Java Memory Leaks Java Memory Thrash Code Deadlocks for Java The application that you monitor takes advantage of multithreading solutions.  Do you know how to discover potential problems in the AppD Controller? Thread Contention  Event Loop Blocking in Node.js BACK TO CONTENTS   Automated troubleshooting with AI Ops  One of the tools provided by AppDynamics' SaaS platform is Anomaly Detection. AIOps supports AppDynamics SaaS customers with automatic troubleshooting to replace the manual process described above, in the troubleshooting section. Machine Learning-based algorithms leverage the data in the AppDynamics platform (such as transactions metrics, components, and their relations and events) and try to correlate abnormal behaviors, and inform AppDynamics users about possible issues in the application with a given Business Transaction.  BACK TO CONTENTS Additional Resources Advanced AppDynamics troubleshooting and tools  ... View more