Track how services impact Business Workflows
This Splunk APM example describes how to use APM service map and breakdown feature to investigate how services impact Business Workflow.
Kai, a site reliability engineer at Buttercup Games, wants to know how the application’s microservices impact business KPIs at Buttercup Games.
To track how microservices impact business KPIs, Kai takes the following steps:
Kai reviews the APM Overview
Kai opens the APM Overview, which generates charts of all services and Business Workflows by error rate or latency and highlights the top services and Business Workflows. Kai finds that 2 Business Workflows, which track business KPIs at Buttercup games, have atypical error rates.
Kai opens the service map to find services with root-cause errors
Kai selects the Service Map card to open the service map. Kai selects nodes with red dots that indicate services with root-cause errors. In this case, paymentservice and checkoutservice nodes are showing root-cause errors.
Kai breaks down the services by workflow to see error details by workflow
Kai uses the Breakdown menu to break down each service by Workflow and selects each workflow node to see charts that provide error and latency details. Kai discovers that the paymentservice contributes to the errors for PaymentService/Charge and frontend/chart/checkout workflows, and the checkoutservice doesn’t impact any Business Workflows. Kai sends this information to the payment service owner to resolve the errors impacting overall business KPIs.
Summary
Kai used Business Workflows to monitor and isolate services that impact business KPIs at Buttercup Games.
Learn more
For information about business workflows, see Correlate traces to track Business Workflows.