APM - List services by host

[RichardH (Richard Hepplestone)]

Hello,

First, I am very much an elastic newbie so please be gentle.

I have managed to set up APM reporting on services and transactions for an application running on a Tomcat application server. We have the same application running on around 160 servers across multiple sites so we would need to be able to show overall performance of a service as well as on a per host basis. Can this be done and can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

[stephenb (Stephen Brown)]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for trying Elastic APM and welcome to the Elastic Discuss Forum.

So when the APM agents collect APM data from services that run on multiple host or containers those transactions are aggregated so that you can observe the overall performance of those service in the APM UI.

In general typically folks want to see the aggregate and then drill down to a single transaction that is performing poorly and yes perhaps see which host it is running on.

So here is an example view Java REST API that I have running on multiple containers in my case 3, your case 150+

This shows the aggregates across the 3 hosts / containers.

Now can always simply filter the entire APM UI by an individual host example to observe the aggregates for that host

In the filter input you can put in example
host.hostname : "84c0a551-455e-4344-5ae8-aa00"
or maybe yours looks like
host.hostname : "my-host-101"

As you begin to type the host in you should get type ahead and a list of hosts... you can also filter by several hosts using the or operator that should pop up in the type ahead as well

Now everything is just pertaining to that one host!

Then when you select into an individual transaction that filter will flow with and the next screen

OR at anytime you are looking at a transaction even if not filtered you can always just click on the host tab and see what host it is running on.

and you will be able to see the host

Also a simple flow is start with the overview of transactions, select a transaction you are interested in, then in the "Transactions duration distribution" panel pick a slow transaction on the right side, click on it, then click on the host tab.

Perhaps try experimenting with this and see what you think... and please ask more questions.

You could create a custom visualization if you really wanted but that is a little more advanced.

And finally , If you are today or potentially commercial customer the integration with the Machine Learning Capability can tell you which of your many services and specifically on which host / container are performing poorly ... automatically.

Hope this Helps... Cheers!

[Eyal_Koren]

Adding to @stephenb's suggestion on existing stuff, we intend to introduce some additional filtering options in the future, though not yet determined when this will be delivered.
If you have an input on that- you can comment on the GitHub issue.