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How to Trace and Analyze Events › Generating Cross-Process Transaction Traces › Select Event Duration and Type Filters

Select Event Duration and Type Filters

In the CA Introscope Workstation select the event duration and type transaction filters to construct your trace filter criteria.

Event duration

Allows you to select the minimum amount of time an event runs before it is added to the trace results.

Filtered Property: The Event duration filter does not use a property but is instead applied against the duration of the transaction.

Value: Contains the minimum duration of the transaction in milliseconds

Supported Trace Sources: Web Services, CTG, or MQ front-end; CICS or IMS back-end traces

Note: The minimum granularity for the duration filter is one millisecond which can be longer than the typical back-end z/OS transaction runs. To get the microsecond duration filter granularity on back-end transactions, omit this filter and use the Microsecond Lifetime filter instead. If you use the Microsecond Lifetime filter, the Workstation does not receive any transaction traces from the front end distributed tiers of the application. Run multiple transaction traces in parallel to get the traces you want from the different tiers.

Important! A duration filter that is applied to a front-end agent causes all transaction correlated to any front-end transaction to be returned from the CA APM Cross-Enterprise Agent or any other back-end agent. This can have a substantial negative impact on the performance. Applying this filter to a subset of available front-end agents mitigates the performance degradation.

Type Transaction Filters

Allows you to select the transaction filters types including user ID, URL, URL Query, header, parameters, and session attributes.

Note: If you want to correlate traces across the tiers, then match at least one trace session to transactions running on your front-end tier. Ensure all the filters that are used are crafted to include the transactions you are interested in generating traces from on the front-end tier of your application. If the agent decides to generate a trace on the front-end tier, it communicates with the back-end agents. This informs them to propagate this decision and generate correlated traces on the other tiers. There is a propagation flag that passed using the instrumented communication method that informs downstream agents of this decision.

Follow these steps:

  1. Log in to the CA Introscope Workstation.
  2. Select Workstation and then New Transaction Session.
  3. Select the Minimum transaction duration check box.
  4. Enter the Minimum transaction duration value and from the drop-down list select Milliseconds or seconds.

    Specify the minimum time that a transaction is traced.

    Format: Numeric milliseconds or seconds.

    Default: 5 seconds

  5. (Optional) Enter transaction filters.

    Note: Data is only available for use in these filters if the CA Introscope Agent is configured to capture it.

    Click the check box and select one of the following:

    User ID

    Select user ID from the drop-down list and enter the user ID value.

    Filtered Property: user ID

    Value: Matches the user ID property of the transaction trace. Indicates the user ID which ran the transaction.

    Supported Trace Sources: IMS back-end only

    Note: Some values of this filter such as user ID does not exist. These values can unexpectedly cause all unsupported source traces to appear in the trace results because they do not contain the user ID property.

    URL

    Select URL from the drop-down list and enter the URL.

    Value: The portion of the URL that is passed through to the servlet or JSP.

    Supported Trace Sources: Not applicable to any trace source. Entering a value for this filter results in no trace results.

    Format: Remove the leading protocol specifier, computer name, and port number.

    Example: /ExampleAppClientV6Web

    URL Query

    Select URL Query from the drop-down list and enter the URL.

    Value: The portion of the URL that specifies query parameters in the HTTP request.

    Supported Trace Sources: Not applicable to any trace source. Entering a value for this filter results in no trace results.

    Format: Remove the leading protocol specifier, computer name, and port number.

    Example: /ExampleAppClientV6Web

    Request Header

    Enter Request Header from the drop-down list and enter the request the header value.

    Value: The HTTP request header.

    Supported Trace Sources: Not applicable to any trace source. Entering a value for this filter results in no trace results.

    Request Parameter

    Enter Request Parameter from the drop-down list and enter the request parameter value.

    Supported Trace Sources: Not applicable to any trace source. Entering a value for this filter results in no trace results.

    Session Attribute

    Enter a session attribute from the drop-down list and enter the session attribute.

    Value: Your session information that consists of a name and value.

    Supported Trace Sources: Not applicable to any trace source. Entering a value for this filter results in no trace results.

  6. (Optional) Enter conditional error-matching-processing Boolean filters.

Important! These transaction filters can negatively affect the performance.

The event duration and type filters are set. Proceed to selecting the CICS or IMS filters.