Use Diagnostic Sessions for Asynchronous Activity

Diagnostic sessions are usually triggered based on the overall performance of a business transaction. However, the overall performance of the business transaction may not reflect the execution time of asynchronous activity. It's possible that the originating transaction executes within normal bounds, while the asynchronous activity takes much longer.

To initiate diagnostic sessions for these scenarios, you can use health rules based on a performance metric (such as response time) of the asynchronous activity. Then, create a policy that triggers a diagnostic session when the health rule violates:

  1. Create a custom health rule based on the asynchronous metric, such as average response time.
    The metrics for thread tasks are visible in the metric browser under the Thread Tasks node for transactions with asynchronous activity. Each thread task has an individual node (usually its simple class name). Select Custom as the type for the health rule.
  2. Create a policy that is based on the baseline of the asynchronous metric of interest, for example, the average response time.
  3. Configure the policy to trigger a diagnostic session on the affected business transaction.
    See Business Transactions.