Prerequisites

Before you set up advanced configurations in Splunk APM, do the following:

1. Send traces to Splunk APM

2. Learn what you can do with Splunk APM

Customize Splunk APM

Once you have started sending traces to Splunk APM and have familiarized yourself with what it can help you accomplish, consider these ways to customize your APM experience.

Index additional span tags

As a Splunk APM administrator, you can index additional span tags to generate custom request, error, and duration (RED) metrics for tag values within a service. Indexed span tags become filter options within Tag Spotlight, enable breakdowns in the service map, and generate RED metrics. RED metrics for indexed span tags are known as Troubleshooting MetricSets. To learn more about adding and indexing span tags, see Analyze services with span tags and MetricSets in Splunk APM.

Filter APM by deployment environment

While you are adding span tags in your instrumentation, consider including the deployment.environment tag. This allows you to filter your Splunk APM experience by deployment environment, such as by development, staging, and production. See Set up deployment environments in Splunk APM to learn more.

Track service performance with dashboards

Go to Main menu > Dashboards > APM Services and select a service dashboard to view charts and visualized metrics about a specific service in Splunk APM. You can edit and save new versions of built-in dashboards to make the information most important to your team easily accessible. See Track service performance using dashboards in Splunk APM to learn more.

Enable Database Query Performance

Splunk APM identifies databases as inferred services in your system to help you see where database-related issues might be causing errors or latency in your services. With Database Query Performance, APM provides additional analytics for supported SQL databases. Database Query Performance is available by default, so all you need to do is enable the feature to begin indexing database-related span tags. See Monitor Database Query Performance to get started.

Set up detectors to receive alerts when issues arise

You can use detectors to dynamically monitor error rate and latency in the services you are tracing with Splunk APM. See Configure detectors and alerts in Splunk APM to learn more.

Set up Business Workflows

Administrators can also set up Business Workflows to correlate, monitor, and troubleshoot related traces that make up end-to-end transactions in your system. This lets you filter Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and visualizations by the transaction types you care about most. To learn more about Business Workflows, see Correlate traces to track Business Workflows.

Continue learning about Splunk APM

The following resources provide additional information about Splunk APM:

• For an overview of important terms and concepts in Splunk APM, see APM terms and concepts.

• For a series of Splunk APM scenarios, see Scenarios for troubleshooting errors and monitoring application performance using Splunk APM.