Monitor applications in Splunk APM

Group services as applications to monitor the health, performance, and dependencies of services that support specific business capabilities.

In Splunk APM, applications are groups of services that share the same indexed span tag key. You can group services as applications to monitor the health, performance, and dependencies of services that support specific business capabilities.

For example, you can create a checkout-related application to monitor the performance of checkout-related services and understand how they affect each other. The application can help you understand relationships and dependencies between services, such as whether downstream applications affect upstream applications.

Prerequisites

To group services as applications, you must have the admin role in Splunk Observability Cloud and complete the following steps.

  1. Add context to spans with span tags in Splunk APM.

  2. Index span tags to create Troubleshooting MetricSets.

  3. Group services by the indexed span tag in Splunk APM:

    1. From the Splunk Observability Cloud main menu, select Settings > APM services & traces.

    2. Select the Applications tab.

    3. Enable the Group applications based on APM indexed tag toggle.

    4. Select an indexed span tag. All services with the indexed span tag key will be grouped as an application.

Monitor all applications with the Applications tab

From the Splunk Observability Cloud main menu, select APM > Applications & services. Select the Applications tab.

The Applications tab displays a table of applications along with their health status and RED (request count, error count, and duration) metrics. Select the health status in the Health column to view the list of alerts for the application.

The health status of an application is the most critical health status of one of its services. For more information on service health statuses, see Monitor service health in the service map.

Monitor the performance and dependencies of an application

From the APM > Applications & services > Applications tab, select the name of an application in the table to navigate to the application overview.

Monitor your application using the following features on the application overview:

  • The service map shows the services included in the application and their relationship to each other.

    To update the map to show related applications, select the filter drop-down icon and enable the Show related applications toggle. In the application map, select an application node twice to navigate to the overview for that application.

  • The Service health and Business transaction health bars show the proportion and number of services and business transactions that have Warning, Critical, or Not assessed health statuses. To enable or learn more about these health statuses, see Monitor service health in the service map and Monitor business transaction health.

  • The RED metric charts list the top 5 services for each metric.

  • The Services, Business transactions, and Endpoints tabs show the list of related entities and their RED metrics. Services and business transactions also include health status. Select the name of any related entity to monitor the entity in greater detail.

Filter the Services or Business transactions tab by an application

On the APM Overview, the Services and Business transactions tabs display a table of entities along with their health status and RED metrics. You can filter the table by an indexed span key to display and monitor only the services or business transactions related to an application.

Complete the following steps to filter the Services or Business transactions tab by an indexed span key.

  1. From the Splunk Observability Cloud main menu, select APM > Overview. The Services tab is selected by default. Select the Business transactions tab if needed.

  2. Select the Applications drop-down menu.

  3. Select an indexed span tag key.

You can use the service map to view the applications that interact with a service. Use this view to understand the dependencies between a service and the applications in your environment.

Complete the following steps to view the related applications for a service.

  1. Group services in the service map.

  2. Select an application node twice.

  3. Select the filter drop-down menu.

  4. Enable the Show related applications toggle.