Troubleshooting production issues with dynatrace

Hi

Let me answer your questions:

1: Yes. dynaTrace traces every single SQL Execution. You can get alerted in case DB Execution time exceeds a certain threshold and then get down to the actual SQL Query including bind values and how long it took. dynaTrace is also able to show you these execution times in dashboards over a longer period of time. that makes it easy to identify certain access patterns, e.g: always slow on monday mornings. Here is a blog that shows how to analyze DB related performance problems in production: http://apmblog.compuware.com/2014/04/09/sync-your-timeouts-when-load-balancers-cause-database-deadlocks/

2: Yes: dynaTrace automatically monitors Disk, CPU, Network and Memory of each machine where you have at least one agent installed. We also automatically alert in case you are running low on disk space. We also have a nice blog that shows how to analyze these types of issues: http://apmblog.compuware.com/2013/06/04/how-to-accurately-identify-impact-of-system-issues-on-end-user-response-time/

3: Yes: dynaTrace traces every single Exception and records it in the context of the user that executed this transaction. You actually get the full users history of events until that error happened including where the error happened and full stack trace. Check out this blog post for exception tracing in production: http://apmblog.compuware.com/2014/04/01/dont-trust-your-log-files-how-and-why-to-monitor-all-exceptions/

4: Yes: as mentioned in #2 we automatically monitor network interface utilization. On top of that we also identify network issues that impact the application by tracing the resulting Exceptions that are thrown. If you want to analyze ALL network traffic in your system I can also recommend you look at our network performance solution. More info here: http://www.compuware.com/en_us/application-performance-management/products/application-aware-network-monitoring.html

5: Yes: dynaTrace automatically monitors GC and Memory Utilization of all of your processes where you have injected an Agent. In case you detect growing memory or high GC Utilization you can trigger a memory heap analysis finding out which objects are causing memory leaks and which ones cause high GC. dynaTrace also automtacally takes a full Java Heap dump in case your JVM crashes with an Out Of Memory Exeption. Thats great as you have all the evidence on-hand instead of waiting for the next crash to happen where you might take a snapshot just before you run out of memory. Same is true for CPU. We show you which methods contribute to CPU Usage. But not only that. We also show you which transaction/users are calling these methods. And one more blog post on memory diagnostics in production: http://apmblog.compuware.com/2014/02/26/memory-leaks-load-balancing-and-deployment-settings-testing-lessons-learned-from-the-ecommerce-industry/

Hope this helps

Andi