.Net Agent Grouping Similar Transactions

The prevalence of Dynamic Transaction names is increasing in various applications, leading to challenges in monitoring application performance effectively. Dynamic transactions are web transactions within an application that share a single URL but have distinct alphanumeric identifiers appended to them each time they are invoked, resulting in different-looking web transaction names. Managing and tracking individual URLs in such cases is an arduous task. However, the feature of grouping similar transactions can be beneficial in consolidating these dynamic transactions under the actual URL that requires monitoring. This grouping capability streamlines the monitoring process and simplifies the management of dynamic transactions.

Configuration Steps for the .NET Agent

  1. Open the Edit configuration window and click on the Transactions Merge tab. Add transaction patterns you want to merge.

    Note: View the grouping transactions with pattern samples here.

  2. Go to the APM Insight .NET Agent installation folder after installing the agent.
  3. Open the DotNetAgent folder.
  4. Open the transaction_merge_patterns.conf file and add the patterns as mentioned here.
  5. Copy the transaction_merge_patterns.conf file and paste it in the following locations:
    • Agent data path

      %SystemDrive%\\ProgramData\\DotnetAgent

    • Agent data path for Windows server 2003

      %SystemDrive%\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Application Data\\DotNetAgent

  6. In the case of multi-monitors, all the sub folders of each application must be placed in the above locations.
  7. Users can add, remove and comment the patterns at any point of time in the configuration file.

Transaction Merge Pattern Samples

  1. The following pattern will match with all transactions that start with aspsite/account/ and it will be renamed as account.

    aspsite/account/*=account

  2. This pattern will match with all the transactions which start with aspsite/ and end with /basicdetails. These transactions will be renamed as basicdetails.

    aspsite/*/basicdetails=basicdetails

  3. The following pattern will match with all the transactions which end with /educationdetails and it will be renamed as educationdetails.

    */educationdetails=educationdetails