Retrieve action parameter from a POST request
We have a test harness page (ex: /web/portal/testhaness) for a web app which supports number of REST services. The specific action parameter which dictates which service is used is passed as part of the body of the POST. How can I group the requests by action parameter from the body of the POST. Currently all requests to all services show up under /web/portal/testhaness on the Web Requests view or the Pure Paths view. I presume I need to use Business Transactions for something like this. Thank you for any info.
first you have to capture these parameters through the Servlet or ASP.NET Sensor Properties (depending on wheter you use Java or .NET). In the Properties you can specify which Parameters to capture (that works for both GET and POST parameters). These parameters will then show up in the Details Dialog on the Entry Point Node of your PurePaths. Once you have these parameters on your PurePaths you can create a Business Transaction that uses this value for splitting
I'm not able to do what is described above using the body of the POST. It looks like very few web application are using Dynatrace? Why is that hard to deal with POST data? We need a http://fiddler2.com/ plug-in to Dynatrace.
Hi Sebastian
It should actually not be that hard to capture HTTP POST Parameters. And - just to be clear - we are talking about PARAMETERS - and not just any type of binary POST Data.
If you can send as a sample HTTP POST Request I can tell how to capture it with dynaTrace
Andi
Hi sebastien.tardif.contractor@gmo.com,
I was able to capture POST parameters in dynaTrace using the servlet properties.
Here is the configuration I used on the servlet. Notice that "Capture details in all filters and servlets" is checked. By default, dynaTrace only captures these values on the first filter or servlet. As you can see from my screenshot above, the doPost servlet is after a number of filters. This might not be the case in your environment but it's worth mentioning.
Save the changes and generate some more traffic. You can use the "*" in the attribute column if you don't know the attribute name you're interested in. Make sure you go back and change that because it's known to cause overhead. If everyone goes to plan, you should see the parameters show up under the details for the post servlet.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Ok, that's great start. But I'm not working with the best designed application, and I'm probably not alone. I mean, it's more likely a bad designed application need more to use Dynatrace...
So what I was hoping to find, and I'm sure lot of people will agree, is a freestyle way of retrieving value from the body.
The options could be the following:
- Using encoding X, example: "UTF-8"
- Apply regular expression Y, example Java class name:
([a-zA-Z_$][a-zA-Z\d_$]*\.)*[a-zA-Z_$][a-zA-Z\d_$]* - Return regular expression group Z, default to group 0.
And make decoding resilient to error by just replacing with a place holder so that I can still parse binary.
If you just need to see the POST body but don't plan on using it in a business transaction, Data Center Real User Monitoring might be an option. Otherwise, you might need to find a method being used in the code that utilizes the data you're looking for as a parameter or return value.
