Ways to Contain/Control Transaction Traces.

Products

• CA Application Performance Management Agent (APM / Wily / Introscope)
• INTROSCOPE

Issue/Introduction

 One common issue that can impact agent/cluster performance is too many transaction traces. The following are some ways to control transaction traces. This will help control the number of transaction traces until a root cause for excessive traces is determined. Note that could be due to new Agent features being enabled by default.  

  This was created at APM Engineering's suggestion.

Environment

All supported APM 10.x releases.

Resolution

Some of the things to try are the following:

1. Disabling cross process trace 

Do the following to turn off automatic cross-process trace feature in the introscopeAgent.profile.  Changes to this property do not require the managed application to be restarted. Note that Smart Instrumentation can still be kept on.

     introscope.agent.deep.automatic.trace.crossprocess.enabled=false

2. Disabling tail filter 

   This can be done temporarily with the following agent settings.  You must restart the managed application to have this property take effect.

     introscope.agent.transactiontracer.tailfilterPropagate.enable=false

3. Disabling the error snapshot.  

 The property introscope.agent.errorsnapshots.enable must be set to true to enable the agent to capture error data. By default, the agent is enabled to capture error data.

Or consider setting the introscope.agent.errorsnapshots.throttle property to zero or a low number. This property specifies the maximum number of error snapshots that the agent can send in a 15-second period.

 

Additional Information

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/content/broadcom/techdocs/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/application-performance-management/10-7/implementing-agents/java-agent/configure-java-monitoring/configure-transaction-trace-options.html  -- Configure transaction trace options.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=4420 -- Smart Instrumentation cross-process automatic trace affects Application Operations

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=5299 -- .Net Agent sending a large amount of (typically backend) traces.

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/content/broadcom/techdocs/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/application-performance-management/10-7/implementing-agents/java-agent/configure-java-monitoring/configure-errordetector.html -- Configure Error Detector