Track how services impact business transactions

This Splunk APM example describes how to use APM service map and breakdown feature to investigate how services impact Business Transactions.

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:

  1. Kai reviews the APM Overview

  2. Kai opens the service map to find services with root-cause errors

  3. Kai breaks down the services by business transaction to see error details by business transaction

Kai reviews the APM Overview

Kai opens the APM Overview, which generates charts of all services and business transactions by error rate or latency and highlights the top services and business transactions. Kai finds that 2 business transactions, which track business KPIs at Buttercup games, have atypical error rates.

This screenshot shows the APM Overview page, which has charts of latency and requests/errors of all business transactions.

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 business transaction to see error details by business transaction

Kai uses the Breakdown menu to break down each service by Transaction and selects each business transaction 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 business transactions, and the checkoutservice doesn’t impact any business transactions. Kai sends this information to the payment service owner to resolve the errors impacting overall business KPIs.

This screenshot shows charts and numerical data of the requests, errors, and root causes in the Business Transaction node.

Summary

Kai used business transactions to monitor and isolate services that impact business KPIs at Buttercup Games.

Learn more

For information about business transactions, see Correlate traces to track business transactions.