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Introduction
Business or Business Ops users are interested in seeing summaries of business which end users or partners conduct. Many of the transactions carry business data which can be extracted and presented to Biz Ops teams. XpT (Experience Tracing) aka Journey Monitoring makes use of business data carried in transactions. Journey monitoring helps business support users to
- Search all recent transactions carried out by an end user, for business support reasons
- Track specific segments of arriving users
- Monitor business value carried in transactions
- Analyze journeys for conversions
- Trace path of a user in failed journeys
- Suggest fixes to reduce failures
Knowing Key Terms
- Transaction
A request response pair together is a transaction.
- Entry Transaction
A transaction that signals the start of journey or flow. A journey or flow could have multiple entry transactions. Entry transactions may or may not have status.
- Exit Transaction
A transaction that signals the end of a journey or flow. A journey or flow could have multiple exit transactions. Exit transactions always have status.
- User Transaction
It is a transaction on a Service which is marked as an “Entry Point”. Actual end user does it via web or mobile devices.
- Internal Transaction
It is an internal message or an internal interaction between various nodes of the application. It happens when an external transaction is processed by the application. It is a call that an internal service makes to another one.
- Partner Transaction
To fulfill a user transaction, an application may conduct direct or indirect partner transactions on third party or external services. It is of two types: Direct – A special internal transaction, which calls a third party. Example: Call to NPIC Indirect – A transaction happening entirely on a third party which HEAL doesn’t monitor. Example: call from merchant POS to Issuing Bank ACS via 302 redirect.
- Transaction Instance
It is an actual run of a transaction. HEAL stores all instances of each transaction subject to configuration.
- Payload
It is the data carried in the request or response of a transaction. It contains name value pairs. Name part of the payload is called as Field. HEAL monitors business data inside the transactions by capturing values in these fields.
Segment Field – It segments the arriving actor (user, partner etc).
Business Value Field – It monitors the amount (business value) of transactions.
Status Field – It monitors business failures of transactions.
- Journey
A user journey or a journey is a set of user transactions that together conduct some meaningful business activity.
- Trace
It is a detailed time break up of user transactions into several internal transactions.
- Correlation Field
Traces are setup using values of a correlation field (usually named as TxnId, TransactionId or similar) which helps to link multiple internal transactions conducted as part of a user transaction. This act of linking internal transactions using a correlation id is called Stitching.
Monitoring Transactions
Transactions monitoring helps ITOps as well as business support users in
- Knowing transaction volume.
- Finding an internal hop of a business transaction that is running slow or failing.
- Determining the service which could be the cause of business transaction slowness or failures.
- Knowing a particular segment of users with high failures or slowness.
Configure Interaction monitoring in VJLogger.
Journeys
Click Experience and Journeys to display all the configured journeys. A journey consists of a set of transactions. A journey can have multiple entry level and exit transactions. Journey dashboard is displayed for the last one hour with respect to the current date and time. 
 | A pod represents a journey. A journey pod is displayed in Red – If there is at least one transaction having a rise in error percentage. Orange – If there is at least one transaction having a rise in slow percentage. Green – If all the transactions in the journey are without rise in error or slow percentage. |
 | This displays number of transactions having a rise in error percentage. Click on the number to navigate to Search screen in Trends. |
 | This displays total number of transactions in this journey. |
 | This displays number of transactions having a rise in slow percentage. Click on the number to navigate to Search screen in Trends. |
 | This displays average volume per minute for entry transactions of this journey. |
 | This displays last one hour volume trend of entry transactions of this journey. |
Click on the number in Rising Errors or Slow section in a journey pod to display the Search screen as follows.
Expand Build Query.
Search query preview box displays the query prefilled appropriately. Transaction box in Build Query section displays transactions with rise in error percentage or transactions with rise in slow percentage. Click 
icon to display journeys in full screen mode. 
Click inside a journey pod to display Journey Health Summary screen as follows. Details in this screen are displayed for the last one hour with respect to the current date and time.
 | This displays minute wise volume chart for arrivals. This displays a volume trend of entry level transactions for this journey. |
| This displays minute wise volume chart for arrivals. This displays a volume trend of intermediate transactions for this journey. |
| This displays minute wise volume chart for arrivals. This displays a volume trend of exit transactions for this journey. |
| A segment partitions the users by the activity type. You can select segment type from the Top segments box. This displays top five segments of the selected type in entry level transactions by volume or error percentage. Use the toggle switch to display the transactions either by the percentage of errors or by percentage of volume. Say, you select ‘By Err’ then, the pod displays top five segments of the selected type in entry level transactions by error percentage along with volume percentage for the most erroneous segments. |
| This displays transaction names which are part of this journey. |
| This displays a service requesting the transaction. |
 | This displays a service where the transaction is being observed. This service executes an inbound transaction in response to a request from peer client. |
 | This displays a service responding to the transaction request. This service executes an outbound transaction in response to a request from the service mentioned in point #7. |
 | This displays the amount (business value) of a transaction. |
 | This displays count of this type of requests at selected time period. When a user discovers a new request, it gets added automatically. As the admin keeps adding fine grained rules, requests are discovered and added. |
 | This displays percentage of erroneous requests of this type. |
 | This displays percentage of slow requests of this type. |
 | This displays average response time of the request in milliseconds. |
 | This displays the transaction response times – how many transactions are within 95th percentile. |
Click 
icon in Top 5 Segments pod to display following screen. This displays the full view of the pod. You can adjust the number of segments you need to view in below screen using ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icons. Those number of segments are displayed in the full view of the pod. If you return back to normal view, you can see all those segments. If you navigate across other screens and return to Journey Health Summary screen, you can see only five pods.
Click ‘<<‘ icon in any of the Volume pods to view the Legend as displayed in following screen. It displays all the unique transaction names in respective pods.
Hover on a data point displays the value of the data point with respect to the time as shown in following screen.
Click icon in any of the volume pods to display full view of the respective volume pod as follows.
Viewing Details of a Specific Request
Click on a transaction in Journey Health Summary screen. This brings up a screen dedicated to this particular request.
| This displays trend of average response time of the request. |
| Trend of the volume. This displays count of this type of requests at selected time period. When a user discovers a new request, it gets added automatically. As the admin keeps adding fine grained rules, requests are discovered and added. |
| This displays the performance of the transactions over a time period. It shows the breakup of the performance for each time segment. |
| Percentile gives an idea of distribution of transactions. This displays the transaction response times – how many transactions are within Xth percentile. Example – 99th percentile |
| This displays errors found in the transaction along with their codes. You can select Technical or Business error from the error box. |
| A segment partitions the users by the activity type. You can select segment type from the Top segments box. This displays top segments of the selected type in entry level transactions by error percentage along with volume percentage for the most erroneous segments. |
| This displays name of the transaction. |
Hover on a data point in Response Time Breakup pod displays the details as follows.
Recent Requests
| This displays list of all the instances of the selected transaction. Instance is an occurrence or run of a transaction. |
| This displays time of occurrence of a transaction. |
| This displays the amount (business value) of a transaction. |
| This displays status of a transaction. It can be one of the following. Success – Transaction without any errors. Failure – Transaction with at least one error. Pending – Transaction which is yet to be completed. It can succeed or fail. Deemed – Transaction which has timed out. It indicates the required operation is not performed on time. |
| This displays payload of the transaction. It is the data carried in the request or response of a transaction. |
| This displays transaction latency in milliseconds. It is the response time of the transaction. Latency represents the elapsed time between earliest and latest events of the transaction. |
| This displays the status code of a transaction. These can be technical or business failures. |
Errors tab displays transactions with errors. It displays failed transactions. Slow tab displays slow transactions with status as SUCCESS.
Hover on the status code value displays the description of the status code.
Search
Search is a quick way to narrow down transactions in scope. You can search across all the transactions using advanced query filters. You can build queries to look up any transaction. You can perform deep dive analysis of the failures using search. You can narrow down to transactions of an application or a journey.
Searching Transactions
Click Experience and then Trends. Click Search in Deep Dive. Following screen is displayed.
Select an application or a journey from the respective boxes. You can see the application selected in the following screen.
You can join the filters using AND or OR. Data in the payload is referred to as a field. Select the field.
Click Add Rule. Following screen is displayed. For a selected field, select the operation. Provide values to search by in the corresponding box. You can select multiple filters and click Add Rule. Application displays the query as per the filters in Search query preview box. It is the text summary of the search criteria.
You can see segments as well as instances. Click Run Query to view results of the search as follows.
Each row of the result shows summary statistics of one transaction.
| This displays the transaction names fitting in the search criteria. |
| This displays total number of arrivals of this transaction. |
| This displays the amount (business value) carried in the request payload of the transaction. |
| This displays the number of business failures in the transaction. |
| This displays the number of technical errors in the transaction. |
| This displays the average response time of all the instances of this transaction in milliseconds. |
| This displays the percentage of slow transactions of this type. |
Click on a transaction in Search Result to display all the instances of it as shown in the following screen.
| This displays list of all the instances of the selected transaction. Instance is an occurrence or run of a transaction. |
 | This displays time of occurrence of a transaction. |
 | This displays the amount (business value) in the request payload of a transaction. |
 | This displays status of a transaction. It can be one of the following. Success – Transaction without any errors. Failure – Transaction with at least one error. Pending – Transaction which is yet to be completed. It can succeed or fail. Deemed – Transaction which has timed out. It indicates the required operation is not performed on time. |
 | This displays payload of the transaction. It is the data carried in the request or response of a transaction. |
 | This displays transaction latency in milliseconds. It is the response time of the transaction. Latency represents the elapsed time between earliest and latest events of the transaction. |
 | This displays the error codes if a transaction has any errors. These can be technical or business failures. |
Hovering on the payload of any instance of the transaction displays the fields in the payload along with their values as shown in the following screen.
You can add a group in the search as shown in the following screen. Click Add Group to add a group while building a query. This groups together a set of filters.
Result of the query with fields grouped together is as follows.
Save Query
Click Save Query to save a query. Following screen is displayed.
Enter name for the query and click Save. Application does not save the time of the query. Saved query is with respect to last 1 hour. You can reuse the saved queries. You can look for trends across all transactions, or, trends in specific transactions of interest. Click Saved Queries to view all the saved queries. You can update these queries.
Manual Inspection
-Build a search query to look up the transaction of interest where status is not success. -Get to a list of all recent instances of this transaction where status is not success. -Click on any instance to see it’s trace. -Inspect a few traces to see if all failures are happening at a particular hop.
Detailed Inspection
-Build a query to see error percentage only for a specific segment for the transaction of interest. -Execute the query a few times to note error percentage for each of the top segments. -Compare the error percentage across all segments you searched. -This gives an idea whether the error percentage is rising evenly across all segments.
Trace
Click on a transaction instance in a search result to display the trace for that specific instance.
| Name of the transaction. A transaction has multiple instances. A trace pop up is displayed for a specific instance of a user transaction. Same trace pop-up is displayed for transactions in this column. |
| Unique Id of the transaction instance. |
| Total number of errors in the trace. |
| Start date and time of the first transaction in the trace. |
| End date and time of the last transaction in the trace. |
| Name of the transaction. |
| Instance of the service. |
| Comma separated correlator ids. Hovering on the id displays actual value of the correlator id. |
 | Trace displays a breakup of transactions as they touch multiple hops or services of an application. Hop (service name) in the trace. Click on the service name to navigate to Service Details screen. |
 | Status of the transaction. In case of failure, it displays the corresponding error code. |
| Top row displays response time in milliseconds of the user transaction. Each subsequent row displays response time of all linked internal transactions. Transactions in the trace are displayed in ascending order of the time i.e. the transactions arriving early are displayed in the beginning. |
Trace with Errors
Correlator Ids
Hovering on the correlator id displays the id along with its actual value.
Transaction Time
Hovering on the horizontal time bar displays the start and end time for a particular transaction in the trace.
Dashboards
You can setup a custom dashboard. Purpose of the dashboard is to view data on certain important transactions.
Building a Dashboard
Click Experience and then Dashboards. Following screen is displayed.
Every new custom dashboard starts empty. Click Add. Following screen is displayed.
In Widgets pane, select Application or Journey. Following screen is displayed.
Select an application name or a journey name from the box. List of widgets pane displays all the available widgets. Click ‘+’ icon on a widget. Application drops the respective widget to Please drag and drop the widget for ordering box. Similarly, you can drag and drop multiple widgets for the selected transaction. You can reorder the widgets. If you need to remove any widget, click ‘x’ icon on the top right corner of a widget in the dashboard pane.
If you select a journey, you can add the user transaction(s) that are part of it. Select a transaction.
If you select an application, you can add user as well as internal transaction(s).
You can add single or multiple transactions for a widget.
You can give any title to a widget. If you try to apply same title to more than one widget, application throws following error.
For the same type of metric widget, even if title is different, you can’t add same set of transactions. If you try to add same set of transactions for the same type of widgets, application throws following error.
You can add multiple widgets to a dashboard.
Give a name to the dashboard. Enter the name and click Save. Application creates a new dashboard with the given name. Application auto refreshes data in the custom dashboard.
Select the newly created dashboard from the Dashboards screen. Following screen is displayed.
When you select a custom dashboard, you can view number of metrics which you select while creating the dashboard. Application displays data for the selected transactions in those metrics. If any transaction doesn’t have data for the metric, application doesn’t display that transaction. When none of the transactions have data for a specific metric, metric pod displays Data not available.
In a particular dashboard, click Full View to navigate to full screen. Following screen is displayed.
Editing a Dashboard
Click the box to select a dashboard. For a particular dashboard which you need to edit, click 
icon. Dashboard builder screen is displayed. You can update the dashboard.
Deleting a Dashboard
Click the box to select a dashboard. For a particular dashboard which you need to delete, click 
icon. Following screen is displayed. Click OK to delete the dashboard.
