welcome to Oracle APM tutorial Series in this video I would like to demonstrate
how you can set up a synthetic monitor how to use the data collected by the monitor also how
to create dedicated vantage point my name is yutaka takatsu I am one of the product
managers in observability and management product management team in Oracle Cloud infrastructure
here is the program agenda first I will create a synthetic browser
Monitor and demonstrate how to use the data collected by that monitor
second I will show you how to create a dedicated vantage point in your own tenancy
in this demo I would like to show you how to create a synthetic monitor
a monitor can be created in a synthetic monitoring page in Oracle Cloud console this
is also the page where you can see the status of your existing monitors in this example there are
six monitors configured in the APM domain you can see the status interval and number of the
Vantage points for each monitor I will go ahead and create a monitor first name your monitor
and select the monitor type I'm going to select the browser monitor
next type in a URL that you want to test against with this manager and make sure that you type
in the entire URL including HTTP you can also specify a text in a verify response content field
this will help you to make sure the right page is loaded click next the first option in this
section is to select Vantage points which you want to run your monitor you can select
multiple locations from the pull down menu and if you already configure the dedicated vantage
point that runs in your own tenancy that will show up in this list as well then configure the
frequency how frequent you want to run the monitor by specifying an interval between
the Monitor runs I'll keep the default values and you can also enable the Network Collection option
this option executes a trace rule against the base URL of the Monitor and provide the
report it provides a valuable information to troubleshoot in case of network issues
Okay click next you can add text if you wanted to review the configurations and click create
okay so the monitor is created next let's see the synthetic monitors dashboard
here is the dashboard page which lists default and custom dashboards
I'm going to select monitors dashboard
and the monitor dashboard shows overview status of the synthetic monitors running in an APM domain so
once your monitor starts collecting synthetic data you can start analysis with this dashboard the bar
chart at the upper left side of the screen shows the number of runs and whether they have succeeded
or failed and the one next to it shows the Vantage points where the monitors will run so if you see
the monitor is fading at all locations you might have a connection issue towards your application
a graph in upper right side displays execution time of the monitor so if
you see spikes that indicate some part of your application is not performing well
and to see more details there are breakdown charts the load time breakdown is closely related to the
execution time so in this example you can see a spike with blue color which indicating the Ajax
calls are slowing down and in case of the network issues connection time breakdown chart can help
you to analyze the root cause the faders in the monitor runs can be caused by the SSL not being
resolved or an issue in DNS also longer execution time may be causing the delay in connection
and looking at the list of the monitors this wine store e2e monitor seems to be
the slowest so let's take a look at this monitor by clicking the monitor name
this opens the monitor page scroll down to see the history of the executions
so this History Section you can see all the execution of this Monitor and it can
also filter the executions such as a Time range by the status or by the Vantage points
and in case of the slow monitor run or failed monitor run there are options to diagnose what's
going on for example you can see the error message in case of the failed script run or Trace details
in case of the network issues you can also see the har file and also the screenshots you can also
download the browser console logs so here let's review the har file this will open the har viewer
in the Oracle Cloud console in har file or the HTTP archive file
stores the information regarding than user action performed on the browser
APM adopted to collect har file at the monitor executions and visualizes in this page
in the upper side of the screen there are pie charts showing load time breakdown information
and in the steps section it shows requests with details such as request type URL Response Code
elapsed time and if you click the URL it shows the HTTP Header information
and there is also a camera icon at the end of the row which opens a screenshot
information captured at the time of the Run and this is where you see the error
Pages such as internal server error in case of the field monitor runs let's close this window
let's close the har file
the har file provides a lot of useful information to diagnose
or troubleshoot your performance issues in your web applications
however in case the root cause is at the back end it requires investigation in application server
so if you have configured APM tracer on application you can use the view Trace
details option to navigate to the trace Explorer page directory from this monitor history page
and this seems to be the slowest run in the list so let's see the traces for this monitor run
view Trace details
and here open the trace Explorer and because we navigated from the monitor history monitor page
the query was automatically created to display the result of the particular monitor run
I can see the monitor ID or the vantage point
and let me sort with the duration
and looking at the main section there is a trace at the top row where it took
16 seconds to complete this may be one of the requests of the slow monitor runs which
we were seeing in the monitor page so let's click the operation name to see the details
so looking at the spans in a gantt chart it is obvious that one of the spans was taking most of
the seconds and from the operation name this seems to be a jdbc span and looks like it's a database
update statement which is a part of the checkout service so this seems to be the root cause of the
slowness but you can also see the database related Dimensions from the span so I'm going to click the
bar of this span scroll down and here you can see the diagnostic details of the span which includes
database connection string or SQL ID which you may want to use to further diagnose the database
as a next topic I would like to show you how to create a dedicated vantage point
you can create a dedicated vantage point from the synthetic monitoring page in Oracle Cloud console
make sure you are in the right compartment and APM domain
then click the dedicated Vantage points link under resources
if you are not an oracle Cloud administrator as a prerequisite
you'll need your administrator to create a policy which allows you to create a
dedicated vantage point and Grant the policy to you or to your user group
and before starting the wizard you need to gather the information such as the vcn details
authentication token APM domain OCID and private key of your APM domain please also check if the
vcn which you want a dedicated vantage point to run allows direct communication to the APM domain
data endpoints if it doesn't you'll need to set up a proxy to have the communication to go through so
in that case you need to gather the proxy server information as well and once these details are
collected you can start the wizard by clicking a link to create an apm dedicated vantage point
and this will open create the stack Wizards page
and in the Wizard you need to follow the instructions the configured entities such
as vcn APM domain oke or proxy along with other information
the first page in the Wizard already has a setting pre-selected including the stack template for DVP
so unless you want to change the default settings you can select next to go to the next page
in configure variables section first name your dedicated vantage point
then select the network compartment
and vcn
here make sure to select the public submit in the domain configuration enter your authentication
token and the domain private data keys and here it has to be a specific Json format
as in the example in a text file
so please note that OCID of the APM domain also the private data key has to be collected in prior
so I'm going to copy this text and paste into the field
next is the oke configuration here you need to define how many nodes you want to in the cluster
the minimum desired is 2 and you can increment if you have more than 30 or 50 monitors running
simultaneously the number depends on the type of monitors you run for example the scripted
browser type is consuming more resources than other monitor types here select my SSH key
and the proxy a proxy is not required but if the target application you want to monitor requires
application access through a proxy even within the specified vcn then set up the proxy is required
and vote configuration this is also optional but it is needed if your
script have secrets or encrypted objects specified
and last two options are project load configuration is checked so you can potentially
diagnose runtime issues with your dedicated vantage point and auto upgrade is checked to
ensure your dedicated Vantage Point automatically gets the latest synthetic Docker image imported so
once you enter all the required information click next and verify the configuration
click on apply create
and this will launch the resource manager job to start the provisioning of the
dedicated vantage point the process will take around 45 to 50 minutes to complete
once the provisioning is completed and your dedicated vantage point is created you can use
it to run your monitors within your vcn within or connected to your protected environment this
concludes the demonstration of creating and using a synthetic monitor also creating a dedicated
vantage point in APM service we have more videos discussing and demonstrating APM features please
see the description of this video to find links to other APM tutorial videos thank you for watching